


If we should meet

by blue_chocolate



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band), Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)
Genre: Apocalypse, End of the World, Hitmen, M/M, Seeking A Friend for the End of the World, mediterranean antics, no research was made for the purpose of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-06-26 22:56:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 52,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19778170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_chocolate/pseuds/blue_chocolate
Summary: Harry wakes from a one month long bender with a gun and an unexpected guest from the past. The world ends in three weeks.AU based on the movie "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" from 2012, starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightley.





	1. The introduction

**14 DAYS LEFT: AUGUST 7th, the introduction**

When Harry dreamt about the end of the world, he often saw his sister.

In the foreground of his dreams, she went through a mundane routine, efficient and quipping to their mother. Harry was never an active participator in these dreams. In the background, tar-thick clouds of fire hailed, gnawed at the kitchen curtains and seared the tips of Gemma’s hair hopping in the breeze from an open window. Their mother sipped from a cup that shattered from the heat while the proud fir next to their patio hauled twigs and branches across the lawn, stripped bare of plant life.

More and more she frequented his dreams, often with their mother as a secondary character. Harry could never step into the frame, never even thought about it until afterwards.

When he woke up, he couldn’t call either of them. So he sucked in the obnoxious mix of incenses Sylvester had brought to the room and clicked the safety of his gun on and off on and off as the fan overhead rotated offbeat, clonking into its own chains. He pressed the barrel to his lips and discovered the heat his palate had plastered on it the night before. Giving it more thought, it might have been from the last time he fell from sleep. It might have been an hour ago, a week.

He couldn’t call either of them, so he fell asleep and deepened the dreams.

When Harry dreamt about the end of the world, he didn’t wake up.


	2. The dick

**21 DAYS LEFT: JULY 31st, the dick**

In the time it would take for the tattoo on Harry’s back to heal, the Earth would have ceased to exist.

Sylvester nursed it to life with ink and a dubious needle borrowed from a boarded-up tattoo parlour down the street, without care for the expiration date. Meanwhile, Harry made a camera out of his fingers and panned it across the perky townhouses, concreted resorts and the flat where Amelia had been murdered.

“So, you’re saying tennis courts?” Harry asked.

“I’m saying I wouldn’t mind tennis courts,” Sylvester said. He had started sketching anew, rapid strokes of precision. “Breakfast buffets, all-inclusive, kids banned, that’s what I’m about.”

“And strip poker.”

“And strip poker! I’m waiting for Lionel’s nudes.”

“ _As if_ ,” was all Harry said on that matter.

From the way the needle was stalling in a singular crevice on his skin, he guessed Sylvester was indignant.

“How about another flat? Further away?” Sylvester asked.

Harry’s camera panned across the ocean which sunlight fogged, breathing of other lands. All his _I will never_ and _I wish I had_ and _What ifs_ had been replaced by a droning, akin to the dull echo following an explosion. He had stopped trying to wade through it and now let it soak him.

“I don’t know,” he said, noncommittally.

“Did I ask you about the take-offs?”

“Wouldn’t you remember if you had?”

“I would have done my best to forget it.”

Harry dropped his hands to his lap. His camera dissolved, and left were grimed knuckles framed by the rings he’d accumulated over the years. “The last flight took off last night.”

Sylvester touched his nose ring. “Shit.”

“But at least the telly still works.”

“Oh. This is bad.”

“Bad? As in whatever you’re doodling?”

Between locals and stranded tourists milling in the street and their soft conversation, Harry hadn’t heard the footfalls now approaching. He saw the sharp edge of Lionel’s dressing shoes in his peripheral vision, felt the change in the way the needle dipped into his skin.

“Hold this?” Lionel pressed an ice cream cone into Harry’s hands and stole Sylvester's needle and ink. His grip was steady, his hands weathered in the crook of Harry’s neck, pushing against the shirt bundled around it. The ice cream watered while the needle laboured and Harry groused.

“We’re playing poker tonight, aren’t we?” Sylvester asked, voice airy.

“If we’re going to play more,” Lionel said, torqueing the flesh below his working hand, “Oughtn’t we have a bigger prize? A scoreboard? A tournament of sorts?”

“Winner gets to tattoo my _neck_ ,” Harry said in a bitten-back snarl. Lionel intentionally let the needle dot him outside of the tattoo.

“You should have practised in Vegas,” Lionel told them. “Ding-ding! The winner is treated to a private plane, all expenses paid. Would you look at that.”

Some ink flicked onto the wooden bench when Lionel discarded the needle and stood. Maybe to admire his work. Maybe to gloat. Harry couldn’t differentiate the lines in the pain across his neck, couldn’t know if Lionel had even used ink at all.

After Lionel had walked off again, Sylvester settled behind him once more.

“Congratulations, Harry,” he said. “You’re officially a dickhead.”

“He drew a dick on me?”

Sylvester sucked in a breath through pursed lips – a sound Harry had come to recognise as _yep_. “He gave you the D.”

Supposedly a tattoo from his youth, the proud banner of stars and stripes whipped on Sylvester's shoulder. Insofar as listing trivia about either of the men, this was what Harry knew. Nothing of age, of heritage, of glory days. Miraculously, they didn’t know these things about him, either.

“Do you know if he has any tattoos?” he asked.

“I bet the only one he has is a bar-code on the back of his head.”

“Ding-ding!” Harry erupted. “The winner is treated to a razor, so he can show his true colours to the rest of the group.”

He rubbed his neck and rolled his shirt back on. Parts of his baggage had fallen victim to customs on their way over, which wasn’t a problem at all, considering the circumstances. Now he sported an _I Love Barcelona_ tee one size below his comfort, chopped up into something wearable. 

Sylvester said, “There is a place where we might go, on the South side of the island. I didn’t mention it because there might be people living there, but not permanently. Not locals.”

“What do they look like, then?”

“Like your sort of company.”

“Is it a flat? A bungalow?”

“Man, it’s an entire motel.”

Unanimously they let out a _ding-ding!_ and got to their feet. Harry exchanged the ice cream cone for wet wipes Sylvester had stashed in his rucksack. Between scrubs he brought his hand to his nose to smell it, the sweet threat soaking there.

Across the street, Lionel stopped pedestrians asking for means of transport in broken Spanish, asking for a helping hand. Someone recognised Harry and waved in passing — an afterthought. In turn, Harry folded his arms over the garish heart on his chest and sulked.

They treaded through town at a safe distance behind Lionel. Losing him in the crowd, they soon found him behind the wheel of a Jeep by the boardwalk. He smacked the side of the door, urging them on.

Harry stopped; people weaved around him. “Wait, what did _you_ tattoo?”

Sylvester slung an arm over him. “I’ll show you when we get to the motel. But I can assure you, you were still a virgin when I was done with you.”

***

Radio wasn’t much to speak of, whether out and about in metropolises or Mediterranean shantytowns, whether fishing for updates on the news or skimming for your favourite rock song. On one area of the island, rumour had it, there was an open stream, free of crackle and white noise.

Harry was not headed in that direction.

Now and then he found his hand on his neck in idle rubbing and Lionel steered the Jeep out of the city through a broken sing-along to the reggae filling the space. Its former owner had padded the back seat with magazines and coupons and an ashtray littered in stubs of cigars and joints. Harry had poured them into the pocket behind the driver’s seat, struggled to wipe the smoke from his fingers. He took his vices in liquids.

Barricaded stores shifted by outside the window. Harry slouched to the discarded knickknacks on the floor, found a Corona, untouched, boiling.

Sylvester leaned back to find Harry sprawled in the back seat, sometimes lounging, sometimes clutching the sweating interior, white-knuckled.

“If this doesn’t work out—“ He started.

Harry drank it anyway. “I know.” He sputtered, rotated down the window and gave it to the wood. Some of it flecked his shirt.

He realised that they had arrived only because the reggae zapped off and Lionel’s singing cut the air. Doors had been slaughtered, vending machines knocked over, the calendar in the reception sagging with crosses in red sharpie and yellowing notes, mattresses dragged out in the courtyard. Sylvester pressed the rucksack into his arms.

One of the car’s wheels crowned a mattress gnawed open since before. Heat howled in Harry’s ears when he got out, regretting the tossed beer. Stuffing from the mattress loitered across the grounds in a dying breeze, plains of nothing claiming the path to the ocean and the trees popping up the mountainsides.

Harry couldn’t get used to the vacancy. It wasn’t what he had expected. The feeling of communion, of memorising important names, it never went away. Vegas had been the same, the feeling there slanted for miles of dust and neon and pretty faces. Each new location promised a new start, if he was willing to seize it. And he was grappling, out of breath, somehow always out of reach.

When Harry surveyed the motel, he didn’t feel anything. It was the greatest gift of all.

Lionel observed the scene with knotted arms and a set stance. He wasn’t singing anymore.

“There they are,” Sylvester said.

There were people in the motel. Mugs and tablecloths and brochures lathered the desk against which heels kicked, all printed with the motel’s logo in a standard font. A fan rippled fabric across their backs, turned to the courtyard, while they dined or played cards or played Pictionary.

Sylvester went in first. It was the diplomatic choice. Lionel inspected the motel sign of awry neon and once boldly painted letters now chipping. It advertised _Kitchenettes! Cable-TV! DVD rentals! Air condition!_

Lionel caught his eye and expressed the abundance of exclamation marks with gestures set to shun everyone below ten and everyone above fifty. Then he attacked the vending machine parked by the reception doorway and cracked a cola open. The cool fizz of it aroused the hairs on Harry’s skin.

Head out for a breath, Sylvester told them to head upstairs, that he was handling the situation. Lionel wasn’t much for handling anything, as far as Harry knew, so he followed when Lionel made headway up the whimsical railing, shouldering into the first open door. Debris had stormed all around from a hole in the wall where something akin to a stretcher waited, a pathway between the two rooms.

“I’ll have this one,” Lionel said with a decisive jut towards the other room. Unable to toe out of his shoes, he wedged one of them off and dived onto the stretcher, skidding into the wreckage of a desk. Metal clinked in the narrow space.

Nothing in the room seemed fit to defile further, to rest on or against, so Harry poised the rucksack on one raised leg, foot rolling from side to side as the zipper stalled. He found a blouse, one of his, wrinkled but clean. The Barcelona shirt was left to decorate the bed while he shimmied into the blouse.

He kept looking, dropped to the floor, rummaging. No more wet wipes – they rested in his back pocket, soiled by sweat – but unmade joints, protein bars, sharpies, leftover garlands, and a map of the island featuring markings of operating supermarkets in particular, the majority of which had been crossed out.

But no poker chips. No cards.

“Motherfucker,” Harry acknowledged.

He stood, left the rucksack on the floor. Sylvester hung from the doorway with a question in his eyes. Harry shook his head.

“It’s ours for the night,” Sylvester said. His gaze flitted between the hole in the wall and the rucksack and Lionel’s single dress shoe tipped to the ceiling. “After that, I don’t know. Dumpsters, canoes, the Jeep…”

“Are they playing cards?”

“Whatever they did, they wined and dined hard while doing it. Had at least fifteen dishes of take-out between them. I haven’t seen any other Chinese restaurants so it has to be from the one we went to. Christ how is it _hotter_ in here?”

“There was a fan downstairs. Windows are…” Harry took the scene in. “There are no windows. If you patch up the holes, I can go for a food run. Have a fan to collect as well, and some cards. We left our stack in the flat.”

“Bring some beers while you’re at it?”

“Roll some joints while you’re stuck here?” He emptied the rucksack and strung himself through the straps. “Looks like the air-condition doesn’t work here, either. Maybe I’ll bump into the manager.”

“Tell him we won’t be paying rent.”

Harry was out the door with a salute.

When Harry drove, it was all windows down, hair awry, music susurrating in the backdrop. The radio bristled to life, one crackle fewer at the time, but he lowered the volume, eyes set ahead. He hid behind sunglasses and a scowl telling strangers he veered towards the riots in town rather than the cleaning patrol.

It brought him back to steaming concrete resorts and flats shyly growing between palm trees and hole-in-the-wall tourist traps or shops harbouring local cuisine. Harry had yet to try the paella.

He crept into his most frequented backstreet and killed the engine. Without the wind and wood sounds to drown the radio out, the presenter blethered in Spanish while Harry unfastened his knuckles around the wheel and twirled his tacky seashell bracelets. She then recapped the news for him in English. A peppy song about forever followed.

In his head, Harry leapt to and from the roof of the car to slithered up by way of the fire escape. In reality, he savoured the car keys in his pocket and entered through the busted front door of the complex.

A single fan slaved inside. Laundry strewed from an upended basket by the stairwell, without an owner in sight. He stepped over the knickers and cropped jeans, bowing towards the chipping wood with each step. The door was still open when he reached the second floor.

Their latest game of poker rested on and around the kitchen table. Rain had prickled the carpet with grime and a plate of nasi goreng had sloshed over bits of the couch where Sylvester had been gnawing them, doing little to abolish the residual incense and scent of rot clogging the room. Amelia’s body kept the bedroom door from closing completely, one foot wedged inside.

Harry ladled the chips and cards into the case, yellows and reds mingling freely. He chucked his sunglasses, jammed the case shut and surveyed the floor for lost cards. He found

the King of Hearts glaring up at him. His entire being prickled with the onslaught of decay, even this close to the open windows, and he barely got the case open to complete the deck of cards before he had to take two fingers to his nose. Just like he didn’t adjust to complete solitude, he couldn’t grow accustomed to the olfactory side of dead bodies.

Halfway down the stairwell, he had the courage to let his nose go. It still pinched the air, but down here the scents of exhaust and dirty underwear were more emphasised. He took a few moments to shake it off, to use the final wet wipes on his face, to sit on the steps and scrutinise the contents of the case, to rest his forehead in his palm.

The deck was complete, even with the extension of one Joker and a half. Rows of chips remained empty, but they could make do with miscellaneous items found in the debris. It would work. And nestled in that empty space, he confirmed upon picking them up, were a handful of fortune cookies.

He cracked one open.

_You_ _will_ _be_ _successful_ _in_ _your_ _work_.

The radio presenter had told him that he had twenty-one days left, but they needed to find a flight within a third of that time. Maybe they had a shot.

He stashed the fortune cookies in the skimpy chest pocket of his blouse, chewed the one he had already opened. Then he stole the downstairs fan and drove back to the motel.

***

All three of them were shirtless by the time anyone stripped to underwear. Sylvester was the first to go, and his shorts ended up tangled in the broken ceiling fan whereas most of his other garments scattered on the floor.

Once Sylvester was out, Harry folded against Lionel’s boxers and single sock, more so as to hinder him from taking pleasure in his bluff rather than out of inferiority. Harry softly smiled when Lionel scooped the chips to his chest, jaw set and eyes dull.

“Ding-ding,” Lionel said. Something sparked in him. “Looks like I won a plane.”

Sylvester looked up from his sprawl over multiple chairs, closed his legs, stopped nibbling pizza crust. His face debated whether to succumb in wrinkles or mould a smile.

“I’ll be needing the Jeep,” Lionel said, less of an inquiry than it should have been.

Sylvester took a cautious bite. “There hasn’t been— Where are you going?”

“Mountains. The guy has a Piper ready to go, a PA-28.”

“You found a plane?”

“I found a plane.” Lionel sighed, toyed with one of the beers they had found in the reception.

Harry’s thoughts drifted to the rest of the fortune cookies. The joint between his teeth quivered.

“So, I’ll be needing the Jeep,” Lionel said, and this time received a chorus of agreement.

“Should I still get undressed?” Harry asked.

Lionel gestured to his crotch. Harry stripped.

“Hey, hey.” Sylvester rattled the carton where tomato and dough slewed apart. Dusk crept over the wooded hills outside, but the cheese-melting, strip poker heat lingered. The fan didn’t reach the pizzas. “Do we have any hats left from Fourth? Garlands, firecrackers, the guitar? Harry, did you bring the guitar?”

“Oh, are you hosting a going-away party?”

Sylvester plucked the joint from Harry and passed it over. “Sure, sure.” He slid off the chairs to pick through the rucksack, tossing patriotic garbage back at them.

Harry acknowledged that they didn’t have food on the regular, the days they were too stoned or unconscious to find a grocer’s shop or fast-food joint, but they had saved a confetti cannon and starry and striped flags. The essentials.

Arms wide and pinching for the joint meanwhile, Harry said, “Do you see a guitar in here?”

“It could be back at the flat, on the street somewhere, up your ass. I wouldn’t know! It’s not my guitar.”

“He left it in Vegas,” Lionel butted in.

“I sold it.”

One of the flags had no staff, so Harry strung it around his hips. Lionel corrected him – “It’s supposed to hang from your shoulders” – and Harry got up, knotted it like a towel. He ambled over to his mattress and fished a cookie from the moth-eaten sheets while the others discussed Lionel’s take-off and tampered with the radio. A throwback to the early 00s conjured drunken song. The wisdom unfurled in Harry’s palm.

_Be_ _cautious_ _in_ _your_ _daily_ _affairs_.

He folded it between his fingers, a tiny thing.

“A few days,” Lionel answered. “Though I’ll go up there tomorrow. You never know.”

“You never know!” Sylvester agreed, pivoted to Harry. “Where’s the zest for life, my friend?”

“I’m going—“

Sylvester doubled over in coughs. Lionel’s belting regressed to humming, to silence. Fingers curled and whitened around the pizza carton, which whipped tomato and chewy cheese into the concrete. Sylvester shivered as he hoisted himself up, the back of his hand to his mouth. He observed the pizza massacre, clearing his throat.

“I’m going downstairs,” Harry said. “We’re out of beer.”

The motel offered him many unsearched rooms. Nothing like Vegas. The heat tasted differently. The junk tangled in the shrubs had other labels.

With the music fading and the sounds of the island coming on to him, he toyed with the wisdom. It scrunched between his index and middle finger; it wheeled across his palm; it gusted from his skin and down the stairs.

He slogged after it, hands busy retying the flag around him. The note teased him in front of the open reception, from inside which voices pattered. Harry lathered himself in the boyish charm assembled over years pandering to old ladies and in the public eye. As an afterthought, he covered his crotch best he could.

Three people lounged at the reception desk, faceless cuts of shoulders and elbows in the whispering candlelight, marking in the calendar that had just hung on the wall, the ears of which were crooked or torn out or blackened in writing requiring a magnifying glass, rustling in the metallic breaths of a fan along with the tails of their hair, the flap of an unbuttoned collar. Harry recognised them, but was stalled by how easily he paired their names with their offhand way of moving the room while sitting still, the fundamental sense of belonging they put out. If he hadn’t once run with them, the mere thought of accompanying them could have sent him to his knees in prayer.

It was Alexa Chung, her cheeks hollowed by the same waxy light that twisted her eyes something likely to challenge chiefs and politicians. Her fingers hung lax around thin air, as if the mere distraction that was Harry had made her fall in to old patterns. It wouldn’t quite be Alexa if she didn’t smoke, or had the habits of it hammered into her bare bones.

It was George Barnett, brutishly gentle in guiding the others through the calendar’s marred landscape. Harry looked at his arms in particular, as if bitten by a cat’s claw or a storm of mosquitoes a sweltering summer evening or from picking corn. The last thing Harry had gathered was that the Barnetts had left the city without once gleaning in the rear-view mirror. It seemed possible that George had spent the last years catering to a vegetable garden and tossing himself onto hay bales and mowing lawns with one of those machines you mounted instead of pushed along.

It was Nick Grimshaw, which was to say it was most of Harry’s desires and fears obscured by laughter lines that steered him to a lopsided smile that promised more than it could give. Nick’s hands jumped, were always jumping, as if readying to seize the steering wheel and jam the gas, to press the _eject_ button. Now his hands, glimmering with decade-old rings in homage to old pop stars and seashells found in the island’s tourist shops, narrowed in on the middle of August, which sprouted of red sharpie.

The sight knifed all the boyish charm Harry had cloaked himself in.

He himself wasn’t without introduction. A mirror askew on the wall presented him as Harry Styles: washed-out junkie nudist, American patriot.

By the time Harry had processed the trio and his own undress, they had only begun assessing him. Alexa had never had far to hospitality, so she was the first to put down her coffee mug and open her arms.

“It’s not _that_ hot, is it?” she asked, nose wrinkled.

Harry forced his tongue to cluck. “I wasn’t expecting… From what I heard, there would… I’m…”

“He’s quite used to it,” Nick said over his cuppa.

Harry hadn’t been prepared to hear his voice, evocative of deadpan jokes, of toe-curling secrets, laced in wine – Harry saw the bottle of red perched as a beacon amidst them. The voice had aged with him.

“Is this the final stop, then? Jamaica, Monaco, France… Chasing the heat?” Alexa said.

Harry wasn’t chasing anything.

“Hey, mate,” George said in the following depth of silence.

“Hey,” Harry acknowledged, reflexively tugging the flag towards his cold-irked shoulders before dropping it back low, secured.

His throat seared. Even with the patter now burked, he struggled to hear the music from the motel room. He could have needed something to ground him. Anything. He swam with the sight of them, the recognition of his past and how it moved against him without his permission.

The desk scraped an inch across the concrete when Nick got off and unbuckled his belt. He had made an effort to tan by the looks of his irregularly burnt thighs, still achingly red in the dappling candlelight. When he chucked his jeans, the flag plummeted from Harry’s waist while he tried to catch them.

Harry’s toes latched in the cleaved denim, a massive rift from just above the knee to his calf, and it had split further by the time Harry had clothed himself. He collected the belt with dignity, Nick’s hand at the far end of the leather.

“What’s going on? Are you staying?” Harry asked, if only to avert their thoughts from his fumbling fingers.

“Some of us,” George said. “Pixie and I are heading back after the party. We’re not keeping tabs on the others, so far.”

Nick thumbed his mouth, eyes raving the calendar. “Ian and Aimee aren’t staying.”

“Is Pix— How many are here?” Then, “ _Here?_ At this motel?”

“This is more of a hobby room,” Nick said, marking the area with a caressing gesture. After his eyes had shot across the same row countless times, he nudged a pen between the pages and shut the calendar. His hands worried at his bare knees, gaze lifted. “This isn’t where the real action will be happening.”

Harry bundled the flag in his arms, crossed. He could stand straighter, that way. He was less of a boy with that stance.

“A happening,” he said.

“Birthday party,” Alexa said. She added, “ _Parties_ , then. All around the island.”

“Yours?” Harry asked.

He couldn’t read the expression on Nick’s face.

“It’s my fortieth,” Nick said.

Harry searched for accusation in his voice. What he found bordered on sentimentality, a feeling Harry had no wish to come in contact with. No resentment there. Not yet.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“I was going to ask you—“ Nick said, and the moment he stood, Harry deflected his speech with a twisted shoulder, feet longing for the night air. George saved the mugs of coffee and their imaginative labels closest to Nick and plucked the calendar from his hand, cautioned Alexa to join him with a jerk of his chin. Their ears were still as perked, and Nick fruitlessly softened his voice. “I have an invitation with your name on it.” He made a swooping gesture with his hand once more, head bowed. “It’s in one of the pockets. Front left, if I haven’t dropped it.”

Harry checked the front right one. His fingers touched an oddly nubby paper, all edges from forcefully folding, and couldn’t be withdrawn unless patiently torqued. Sans the patience, Harry got it out in the open and examined the text, fingers running along the textured letters. It wasn’t Nick’s handwriting – his letters would have seeped to the corners of the invite and beyond in knots and bows.

“I don’t know,” Nick added. “You look like you’re caught up in something.”

Before realising what his face heated for, his hand had slapped down on his neck. The contours of a cartooned cock suffocated under his palm.

“I’ll be busy.” Harry stewed the card back, nudged a pair of quarters in the pocket.

George said, “It’s a bit of a pick and mix situation. Nick will have his celebration; we’ll celebrate me; the end of the world… If you find a gap in your schedule.”

Harry hummed, a distracted noise. “Yeah, I can check. I have to go but I’m assuming you will be spending some time here at the motel?”

Affirmative nods. He took a step back.

“Yeah, I can check,” he said again, and then the night enveloped him. He stopped at the sight of his fortune, snatched it from the cradle of rocks it had nested in against the wind.

“Harry.”

He snapped up, looked Alexa in the eye.

“See you soon,” she said.

A promise. A prediction.

He hoped not, but walked from the reception with a wave and averted gaze. For safety he knotted the flag around his neck. He and his cape made way through the night, forgetting whichever reason he could have found for leaving the booze-shrouded motel room, swatting gnats on his chest.

They couldn’t settle here, either. There was the possibility of Lionel having spied on properties in the mountains during his daytrips to his pilot. There was the possibility of finding an oiled-up yacht ashore, loaded with magazines and familiarly labelled cava. There was the possibility of conquering one of the still functional grocery shops and the prospect of cowering from the world, sunshine and nightfall flirting with them through the plastic-pampered windows, appealed to him more than spending his remaining days in a bunker in the mountains. But the bunker could be his safest bet. Men like him had to take what they were handed, even if they didn’t deserve it.

“Pants!” Sylvester shrieked upon his entry.

Lionel wrestled him to the floor while he was examining the state of the room: largely unchanged since his departure, but chocking to witness. The jeans joined the top of the debris amidst the room.

He let himself be stripped, the slip of paper hostage between his cramping fingers. Neither of the others wore clothes. The smell of weed trickled from Lionel’s being on top of him whereas Sylvester blew music into the various states of empty beer cans. And the aching had returned, rattling Harry’s spine by the marrow. Britney Spears chanted about womanizers in the background.

It reminded him of Vegas.


	3. Kale

**20 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 1st, kale**

On the first day of August, Harry woke up with a hangover. It caressed him into consciousness, coalescing with the dreams of his childhood home. His mother and sister had watched _Notting Hill_ while Harry leaned against the mossy drapes of the couch, nudging toys together with his heels. It was hard labour for a visionary such as himself. Gemma measured his hair and made snipping motions with her fingers when he didn’t pay enough attention to her.

“One day I’ll bring real scissors,” she had told him during the commercials – Anne was dicing carrots and cucumber in the kitchen, the second attempt in what would turn out to be a decade-long struggle to convince her children of a healthier lifestyle. In hiding, though, rebel Gemma would slip vegetables into her lunchbox whereas Harry would try to wangle desert biscuits into his, and their mother observed and calculated. In the best of worlds, Harry would also catch on to what his sister did.

“Do I need to cut it?” he had asked.

“I want you to. You can’t find out what you like if you never try new things.”

“Why do you want it?”

“I haven’t seen you in short hair since you were—“ Her fingers left his hair as her arms first broadened then narrowed across the couch, a microscopic space between. “— _This big_.”

Harry contemplated.

“But _you_ haven’t cut _your_ hair.”

She took his hand in hers and snuck up the stairs. Something grinded obnoxiously in the kitchen while the steps shuddered under her determined hops and Harry’s stumble. They had

She delved into the shower cabin and withdrew their mother’s razor. Manual on dry skin, no shaving cream in sight. She shook her head, discarded it. She repeated the process with a pair of nail-clippers.

Harry dangled his legs from the toilet seat and stomached an aching desire for his wooden trucks downstairs. Years later he would toss those trucks out in the face of moving, with wry remarks from his mother about how they were hand-painted by his father. He would look upon them and scratch the gnarled paint and three-wheeled favourite he had kept by his bedside for years. Then he would toss them out.

Their father had left behind trinkets in the backs of cabinets and in mementos partly created by their mother and therefore indestructible – the Nintendo 64 he (and _Gemma_ , he was tediously reminded) had gotten for his last birthday party; the birdhouse nailed to the mightiest oak in the backyard; recipes from Anne’s parents Mr Styles had written down because his handwriting could be read by more than one family member. One of these trinkets, Gemma found, was an electric razor.

She held it between them, resplendent in the evening light. Thrill sparkled in her eyes from the act of rebellion, but all Harry could think about was the comfort downstairs.

Deciding against lunging at him, Gemma took a fistful of her own hair, just behind the right ear, and nestled the razor against her scalp. It whirred to life and died within seconds. A tuft of her hair hung from her grasp. When her hair fell back down, it veiled the chops below.

“Now I can cut you.”

“Okay.” He blinked up at her, her cheeks smooth as they would be throughout her teens while he battled zits. “Okay. Do it.”

Hair streamed around him. His palms pressed to the porcelain toilet lid, his back crooked towards the floor where his sister brushed his hair aside with absent sweeps of her feet.

The dream dissolved into obliterating headache before their mother could enter, but Harry knew how the story went.

Awake, awakening, he hurtled from the motel mattress, one hand to his temple and the other one wheeling before him, the images sparking on his eyelids, less and less fact and more wishful thinking.

It wasn’t until he had doubled over the railing and been thawed by the ocean’s salt and decadence of the motel that he realised this hangover wasn’t physical. And that it hadn’t been a dream, either. When he rubbed his fingers together, he felt the paint his father had so fondly smeared on those trucks, felt his father’s colourful fingers on his face where the mask of a ferocious tiger had just been drawn and laughter bubbling in the pits of his stomach—

Harry vomited over the railing. Grains of rice latched to the metal in a sauce of upsettingly yellow tones. Most of it spread over the rocky courtyard. Lionel stepped from the reception and into the outer circle of the pond, unimpressed.

“Daymares are a thing, you know,” he said, nursing his first joint of the morning. “If I can find an English dictionary here in these shelves, I’ll show it to you.”

What was he even doing down there? Reading? Arguing with Nick?

Nick. On this island. In this motel.

Were they still downstairs?

He didn’t push his luck by opening his mouth. Overtly he grasped his stomach.

“Yeah,” Lionel agreed. A billow of smoke dragged itself through the reek and up to Harry. “Your tolerance is dreadful.”

Lifting a hand in adieu, Harry clambered back into bed. The pillow puffed at him with the kind of damp that promised mite and someone else’s sweat. He could swelter in it until the end of days.

The radio that had screeched out music to their debacle last night perched within reach of his inch-high bedframe. Minutes passed of him ogling it, intercepting scuffs in adjacent rooms and Lionel’s curse-flavoured hunt for pages from documents or books gusting off. It was more modern than the one Amelia used to fiddle with, flu stuck in her throat and sodas fizzing at the nightstand – all buttons instead of loose-fitted wheels to twirl, a single white screen to display channels and volume.

They had all taken turns sleeping in the bed, in the flat. One each on the two couches, two in the bed.

He had lain with Amelia on the first night of the flu. Her nightmares had been more vocal than either of theirs; Harry often found himself gasping into his pillow when waking and Sylvester talked in his sleep, conveyed dreams of gory wealth. Lionel always slept with open jaws, the whites of his eyes a vulnerability as much as they were a warning.

Amelia’s nightmares were physical. They twisted fleeing words deeper and deeper into her throat until they ripped her open in a shriek, which woke most of the flat’s tenants. Once she had shaken the most vivid memories from her eyes and Harry had checked on the others as he’d given up sleep, he had sat on the bed with her for hours. He’d rejected her questions about his wellbeing, rejected the notion of showing her the nail marks she had left on his forearm.

She had gone back to sleep. A quiet rest. Harry had moved to sit on the balcony as the sun rose. He liked watching the sun rise.

Beers supported the radio, although holes already popped in the outskirts of the plateau. The odd soda glared from the mass. He wanted to put it to his forehead. If he focused on

them, rings of liquid permeated the metallic surface, singing to him in rings thudding out across the pool, more and more frequent—

“Dude, you look faint.”

Harry discovered his hand on the radio, as if to weigh it down. It had clammed to the surface. A fat smear of his finger coated the display.

He grunted something, found his lips to be stitched together by the heat.

Sylvester leaned for the bed but thought otherwise. He scooted a chair out and sat, stomach to backrest, chin on hands. A can hung from his clutch, label stripped off. Its perspiration didn’t vanish when Harry blinked.

“We should get you some meat,” Sylvester continued. “Here you are, pining away in some motel whereas Lionel is… Actually, I think he’s reading up on the lore of the island. Probably would love to tell you about it when you get up. Oh, yeah – point is, if you don’t have your strength, what _do_ you have? The radio doesn’t even work.”

Harry scowled, and when he did, became aware of the drool strung on his arm. He sneered and smacked the radio. It hissed at him. Trying another button to no avail, Sylvester took his wrist.

“I broke it last night,” Sylvester confessed. “Don’t touch the back of it, if you haven’t already. Just a load of grease, and— Look.” He picked it up, mindful of Harry’s palm still latched to it, and shook it. Bits that shouldn’t have moved banged inside. “Means it won’t catch any transmissions, but if we find a record or two, we can try it out.”

Harry wiped the drool from himself.

“So you don’t want meat?” Sylvester’s gaze went inward. “What have I actually seen you eat? Rice and fortune cookies? Oh, I see. You’re a salad guy, stanning one of those raw juice fads. Okay, so when I go grocery shopping, should I buy toilet paper, gin and ribs for us and just—“ He made a snatching motion close to Harry’s nest right above ground. “—Uproot some beets for you? Do you want kale?”

Harry could fancy some kale.

He opened his mouth to speak but a retch pulled him back.

“I understand.” Sylvester said. He patted Harry on the shoulder, turned for the door. “If you’re feeling up to it this afternoon, we’re driving up to see Lionel’s pilot. Drink some of this.“ The can’s arctic side pressed to Harry’s forehead, balancing on Sylvester’s fingertips until Harry managed to support it himself. “Press it on yourself till you cool down. I’ll be back in a bit with food. And I’ll see if they have kale.”

***

An hour of lying with the sweating can against his cheek had Harry sitting up in bed, dividing the deck of cards into separate suits, then into courts and regulars, then seeing how far he could propel a card across the room. His high score made Lionel cuss in the courtyard. In victory, he downed the beer and launched that through the window as well.

Knuckles rapped on the door. At some point, it might have stayed shut, but the lock had been broken in the riots (Harry assumed; it could have been another bender casualty) and so it swung open as Harry flicked a card into the gap between Nick’s sandal and the concrete floor.

Nick didn’t become aware of it until he realised why Harry refused to meet his gaze. He plucked it and entered, held it out for Harry to take. Harry did.

Nick sat in the space Harry had made for him on the bed.

“How much did you hear from last night?” Harry said.

“We left around midnight. Before the real party started, I suppose.”

“Why are you here?”

“To celebrate life. Ibiza was full. Are you— Do you have any plans for the rest of it?”

Harry’s hand found the lukewarm can at his side. “The rest of it?”

“Three weeks,” Nick said. “I’ve planned for two of them, unless you’re busy.”

In case of vomiting, Harry had changed out of his blouse and back into his _I Love Barcelona_ tee, sometimes trembling and sometimes sizzling in the sleeveless creation. During a bout of chill, Harry had recovered Nick’s jeans and put them on. Now, Nick twiddled the shredded denim while transforming purpose into words, cautious of what might come out.

“Tell me if I’m wrong, but this is your final stop, isn’t it?”

Harry watched his hands work.

“This was never part of my plan,” Harry said. “I’m here because my plan didn’t work out. Now I’m losing faith in organisation.”

“But you never needed complete control to function; showing up on my doorstep at four in the morning; writing most of your album in an airport in the margins of a calendar when the flight had been cancelled—“

“Wrote four and a half songs that morning.”

Nick rearranged himself on the bed, hands tucked in his lap, immobile. “Incredible.”

“The world wasn’t ending then.”

“It doesn’t have to be ending.”

Temporary buckets of ice had been given to the bedside to store the beers after Lionel had grown tired of cards hailing in the courtyard. For maintenance, a blanket had also been tossed over it.

Nick reached for it and fished one up, measuring Harry’s reaction. Harry’s composure sagged and he stretched a hand out himself. Both cracked theirs open, let them fizz into silence. For a second, Harry pressed the freshly cold metal to his temple.

And Nick gauged him, eyes fond and heavy.

Harry ducked his head. “Nick, I can’t do this again.”

“Do what?”

“You.”

“Just show up. Have a few drinks, a good laugh, find some meaning. One day, or two. However many you can spare. Yeah?”

“We’re moving out of the motel this week – maybe up in the mountains or to the northern side. It’s not clear yet. So I’ll be a little out of reach, and I can’t plan out what—“

“I’ll write you an hour-by-hour schedule, for each day, if that’s what it takes.”

Where Nick’s voice had just carried an edge of comfort, it breached with need. Previously Harry had found his hands lenient, but now he saw that they were mooring Nick’s being. The need, in turn, gave way to resentment.

“I can’t come,” Harry said.

Nick stood, twisted the can in thought. “They want to see you, whichever you choose. Pixie’s deal-breaker was knowing you’d be here. Leaving the kids, remodelling her list.”

“Pixie has kids?” Harry asked.

Nick softened again. “If you get lonely, you know where to find us.”

“I do?”

Nick shredded a piece from the notebook they had kept poker scores in and quantity of times stripped and drinks downed. He started writing down an address, then changed his mind, crossed over and crossed through. When he handed Harry the slip of paper, it had become a map of the coast, with a dashed walk from the motel to an X amidst _The Mandela Wellness Resort_.

“It’ll be the building with the balloons and the garlands,” Nick said. “Good luck on the end of days.”

He walked out, sandals clopping down the concrete stairs, sand wheeling through the doorway in his absence. Palm trees hummed in harmony with Harry’s steadied breaths. The nausea returned.

***

When the groceries came, all three sat down to dine in the reception. They drank from the coffee mugs left from last night, and Harry could now read their prints – one had something resembling a 90s TV-series logo embellished with a slogan in illicitly orange quotation marks; one boasted a faded Nescafé sticker; one had been decorated with cracks that had Harry running his finger over it and over it to see if they were real.

Lionel finished first and while the other two each gnawed a slice of melon clean, he spoke about the legends of the island.

“ _San Borondón_ ,” he said. “Heard it, perchance?”

“San Antonio is what I’m hearing,” Sylvester said, his voice inching towards mocking.

Lionel didn’t appear agitated; he was swimming into familiar waters.

“So technically,” he said, “The Canary Islands consist of eight islands, not excluding the volcano on La Graciosa, but for the sake of this myth we’ll stick to the common seven-island mould. Just as time was on the cusp of the 16th century, an inconspicuous vessel landed on one of these islands.”

“San Borondón?” Harry guessed.

“Named after its discoverer, Saint Brendan of Clonfert.“

“Dude’s Irish,” Sylvester cut in with a look that informed Harry of his idle leafing through books in the reception alongside Lionel’s raptness.

“Dude’s Irish,” Lionel said, albeit clinging sourly. “About fifteen monks, including himself, was on the boat, searching for the New World, and instead came across this eight island. They settled and lived there for six years, experiencing quite honestly mythical events – this isn’t the interesting part. One day at mass after those six years, they felt the island quaking below their feet, signalling that it was time to set sail once more. And in their boat, offshore, they saw the island veil itself in mist and submerged not unlike a whale. Therefore, a common name for it became _The Whale Island_ , not unsurprisingly.”

But Harry could see his smugness. Lionel had a penchant for names, and nicknames, and a language’s intricacies, Harry was coming to learn. The more knots in the story, the more rewarding the solution.

“So the general public believes this ghost island, this phantom of the sea, to reside somewhere within the Canarian archipelago, as did I given the overwhelming quantity of sightings in the 18th century as well as in modern days. _However_ ,” and the word tingled with glee – Lionel flung a jaggy folder onto the table, “This very reception downstairs had testimonies garnered over the past hundred and fifty years or so, aiming the suspicions towards this island. Just look at this!”

The text was watered beneath the plastic sheath. Sections of it had been replaced with pencil, interpretations that immediately contradicted each other.

“These are from a Norwegian tourist back in the nineties,” Lionel said and pointed to Sylvester, a gesture made even more childish by his character. Sylvester looked deeply offended. “Statement says he saw a cleft in the thick of the morning haze: a mountaintop, and a shoreline glimpsing below. In the very same vein as the stories of the Canarian witnesses.”

“Ever been to the islands?” Sylvester asked.

“El Hierro and Tenerife,” Lionel said, sliding the folder across the crumb-dappled tabletop and over to them. Pride rattled in his fingertips when they touched off.

“Thousands of witnesses have reported seeing it. The legend runs deep. It’s not important whether San Borondón exists or not, or wherever it _would_ exist, who’s out in the woods or who’s hitting something undiscovered. The importance is that opinions diverge and that people aren’t shy of supporting their claims, no matter their likelihood. People need to believe in something.”

On the last cut of melon, Harry scraped his teeth across a peak of flesh. The prospect of Lionel having hobbies was unsettling. Juice licked his jawline.

“Are you a man of the arts?” he said, only an edge of ridicule in his voice, a tease of accent.

“Says the _rock star_ ,” Lionel said.

One unfortunate sober morning in Vegas, they had found an image of Harry online. It had been misplaced in a quiz answered to calculate the perfect last day on Earth, and it had been an accident. The accident had also worn a dog collar, which was the pinnacle of an evening’s jests and the occasional remark coming in and out of the casino or when dragging themselves home laden with women, with cocaine, with empty futures. Just like Sylvester’s first-week-of-the-bender-STI, it rarely surfaced in conversation anymore.

“Do I believe there’s a Spanish ghost island?” Lionel continued, and he had risen from his chair, bombastically delegating them. “I think not! Dear audience, I think not!”

“I took the liberty,” Harry said as stale coffee licked his bottom lip, “Of skimming through brochures in the offices downstairs, from this century and the previous. There are some fantastic hotspots for tourism here – we’re just on the cusp of the belt. And there are some estates I think we could all be very interested in.”

Sylvester’s sleep-droughty eyes lolled to him. His index finger knocked against his nose ring at a mild pace. Every third knock brought with it a brush of eyelashes across his cheek, the hairs clipped but elongated in the evening shimmer. He had returned from the market with

a tie loose around his neck, and now used it to dab sweat from his face and throat more than for fashionable reasons.

After one of these dabs, he asked, “Do you want to move? _Again?_ ”

“This isn’t the right place.”

“Bring me another excuse.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

Sylvester’s focus cut to Lionel – the harangue had stopped and Lionel had reclaimed his seat, posture pensive. “Were there any establishments of certain _lux_ in the brochures?”

“The preamble was barely in English.”

“Long as you don’t forget to refill the gas in the Jeep, you basket cases can do whatever,” Lionel said.

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” Sylvester asked, head drooping at Harry beyond rescue. “Let us have a final night of three-party strip poker, have some beers, propel our dicks around, luckily have a blackout first thing in the morning. Because that is something I could energise myself over.”

“Your last night as twin losers. After this, one of you _must_ win.”

“It’s going to be me,” Harry said, but his thoughts were with what he would have to face in the morning once the blackness started to come off him.


	4. The pilot

**19 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 2nd, the pilot**

Harry flipped open and shut a notebook he had taken. It contained a handful of used pages, which he had torn out, a treasure waiting for him in a desk drawer in the motel reception. He hadn’t had any luck in finding a guitar, but he kept most of the music in his head. Songs teased across his mouth, forbidden to be voiced, while the windshield wipers slowed and stopped.

He flipped the notebook open and shut and didn’t write anything. It hadn’t worked in Scotland and it wouldn’t work here. He couldn’t articulate his own emotions to himself, but he longed to. How he yearned for it.

He had never been up in the mountains on the island – on _San Borondón_ , a nickname coined by Lionel’s reignited or faux belief in the legend. It differed from the finely pebbled shores of France, or the hut he had rented by the Scottish border during what was meant to be the conceiving of his third record. Jamaica was plenty of mountains, but he found his nine to five days playing out in the studio and by the poolside and in the bottoms of drinks experimentally concocted by Mitch.

These were proper mountains. It had fogged during the night and so sun started to breach the thick and the ridges and runnels in the rock became more prominent in favour of the postcard look Harry had observed in the brochures. The vegetation narrowed in on the road; now and then a cluster of birds took flight while the radio fought to broadcast a pop song Harry couldn’t recall the name of. No houses crowned the hills yet. There had been an inhabited valley farther down, right around the first bend, where a lantern had been left on a porch and the door left gaping as the Jeep rolled by.

Lionel had eased up on his chatter. It seemed as if it was adieu on his behalf, this empty state. By the few glances stolen from the back seat, Harry didn’t find him to be particularly content, nor agitated. There was a gun wriggled into his trousers, so nothing out of the ordinary. The car fought through mud and Lionel secured his grip on the steering wheel. Sylvester sang along to the radio and Lionel adjusted the rear-view mirror.

Reconciliation waited at the end of the road.

Suddenly they came out of the fog and were met by a tangle of possible continuations. The biggest road signs had been painted over. The car braked and snuck forwards in the sunshine ricocheting on wet metal. Two heads darted behind the windshield with squints. Harry only paid mind to the situation when they stopped moving. He snapped the notebook shut.

The driver and passenger ogled the splitting road before ogling each other.

“I know extremely limited Spanish,” Lionel defended.

“It so happens that I know a great deal more,” Sylvester said.

He lingered in his seat, fingers whipping on the handle, as if ready to bolt. The door clicked open and swayed in Sylvester’s absence as he strutted forward and ran his thumb under the letters. His back crooked. One of his hands rested against his lower back. Classic old man pose, Harry reflected.

When he was barely halfway back to the car, Sylvester said, “Can you imagine? Five years of Spanish showed down my throat by Mrs Mendoza and cramming vocables and now is when I’m using it. Life’s tricky. Did you ever get threatened with being woken up at midnight and forced to recite—“

“Which way?” Lionel interrupted.

Sylvester swayed into silence, then pointed.

Lionel drove.

The landscape changed little during the drive, but Harry could smell the shift in nature. It smelt of sawdust and oiled engines and old glory. The caked mud cleft by two sets of robust wheels was exchanged for asphalt, barely recognisable beneath the grit. And from a wall of glimmering vines burst a metallic wing. It looked ready to behead, but as the Jeep scuffed aside the green drapery Harry noted that it was rounded at the edges, nothing lethal unless it came at you at one point seven miles an hour. The vines had been hung above in roots escaping the mountainside and tossed over but came off with the brush of a hand, and so differed from the rest of the milieu. Lionel dusted the plane off with a laugh.

Upon seeing a man crooked over a flowerbed, Harry realised that more than anything, he was surprised to find the pilot to be real. It didn’t quite sit well in his gut.

Sylvester took them both by the shoulders and the wall of three men examined the blackened river funnelling down the pilot’s spine, teasing at his cargo shorts. Much like Lionel had tanned furiously but not to an even satisfaction, this man had the complexion of a Northern, emitting unease about being out in the sun for too long, as if his skin would begin pooling at his crimpled socks as noon approached. But poking around in the earth, somehow, he looked content enough.

Gazing at the dampening of the man’s back, Harry was overcome with an urge to return to the car. They hadn’t wandered far; already on their way up had they passed two smaller runways, roads closed off and embellished with warning lights, so the plane only needed a

place to rest between flights, not an actual runway to coast down. In the very back of his head, as a passing thought, Harry realised he couldn’t move his feet and so he swayed idly while the man puffed a growth serum on his plants.

The man worked by the wall of the house, where young cypresses lined up to sneak a peak of his handiwork, vibrant with dew. At the far-left corner of the flowerbed, a mighty bougainvillea embedded the pick and mix of tamed flora and curled towards the terrace where the plane stood. Awry sprouts nipped their bared skin, took the white stucco pillars back to nature.

A stack of paper sweated by the man’s heel. Lionel crouched to pick them up, not unlatching from Sylvester, and began leafing them through. Illustrations of mechanics showed between the fugitive pages.

“Don’t pet them,” the man said. He pulled the trigger to the spray once more. “Another two-three days and these will be back to standard – or better! Though I have little hope for that, I won’t lie to you…” He turned and almost looked at them, but his gaze fell short on a children’s plastic bucket and the spades inside it. He took one and resumed work. “I haven’t always lived here. It started when my son-in-law visited his wife here and developed a bit of an appetite for recklessly spending his money. Of course, by then I was living on the northwest coast…”

“Sir—“ Lionel started.

“… So I haven’t been living _here_ for very long at all. The two didn’t get along – my daughter and he, I mean – and so I flew her back to the mainland one day and the fellow stayed behind. Haven’t seen him since, now that you mention it. Hope he hasn’t gotten himself into any major trouble, although I wouldn’t be surprised if… See, he always had a way of attracting the wrong crowd, and I told her to keep out for signs…”

Lionel smacked the manual shut, kept it between his palms.

Harry could move his feet.

“Sir,” Lionel punctuated. “Since you’re loitering around here in the soil I assume the Piper is ready?”

The man looked up. His T-zone only distinguished itself because it was peeling. The rest of his face had tanned evenly.

“She’s beautifully ready,” he answered. “Fuel arrives later this week and she’ll be good to take you back, finalise your business and other things you intend to do.”

“You said to have it prepared for flight tomorrow.”

“Yes. Why, I just fixed up her wing and tail. Unfortunately the rips in the seat are still there and I don’t have the tools to fix it. Fuel is just taking a bit longer – the fellow lives down by the flooded parts, has a hard time coming up here. And his supplier is having some problems as well, given what’s happening and all.”

Lionel’s grip around the manual shifted and Sylvester took it from him before it could squelch on the ground. Vines whipped against the body of the plane in a dying gust.

“Given what’s happening,” Lionel echoed. His fingers ran along the waistline of his shorts. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Afraid not,” the man said and sat back down. The spine of his chequered shirt began bleeding anew the moment he shovelled aside a lump of dirt. “Water takes what water wants.

Can’t get down there myself, either. The roads are locked up. Riots ought to start soon, though, so I wouldn’t fret.”

Lionel’s wandering fingers found a destination. He drew his gun from its holster. “So, what sort of plants are you growing here?”

“Bits and pieces. They’re not my plants to grow – I’m just tending for them until… Well, I reckon the owners aren’t coming back. Before we fly back I want—“

With a sound that ricocheted in the mountains, a bullet whipped him in the back of the knee and launched Harry’s hands to his ears. The sentence overturned in a suck for breath, a drowning man’s last claim at the surface. The bullet went through his leg and wedged between the sparse stones in the flowerbed’s framework. Another burrowed in his neck, prickling the blushing bougainvillea with a rusty colour. Where the same blood sprinkled the stucco wall, it took on an invasively red shade. The other shots left no room for inquiry. The man’s crouch slipped into a kneel that ended with his head bursting through the blanket of flora and his teeth hooking into the soil.

The palms of Harry’s hands pressed through the flesh and lumping cartilage of his ears, kneaded the bone in desperation. No matter how hard he pressed, at whichever angle, the sound stocked in his head. Every time its power ceased, it hit something in his skull and found strength. It was a rock plunged into the air in a limbo between firm grounds, echoing _not again not again not again not again_.

Condensation beaded at Sylvester’s nose ring. The drops shivered and plummeted to the earth in a rhythm unlike his erratic breathing. He had dropped the manual at some point and now its damp pages flitted through the wind, its timbre mild against the aftershocks. The mountains lamented their presence.

A tremble in the arm forced Lionel to finally pocket the gun.

“Can you stop _murdering_ our acquaintances?” Sylvester said, up to which point Harry hadn’t believed he could get upset about anything other than booze ebbing away. For a moment, his voice latched to the gunshot ringing in Harry’s head, but soon slipped off. Harry kept his ears tucked. His wrists ached.

Lionel fished up the car keys from a pouch near the holster and set off towards the car. His steps lagged in the air whereas his back slouched, a standard pose of his but now misplaced with his actions. His hand snaked out to the plane in passing and keyed its flank. Rocking into the Jeep, the headlights cracked open and the engine purred.

After unsuccessfully speaking and reclaiming his body from shock, Sylvester took Harry by the elbow and they got in the car.

Harry curled in the backseat. The compromised space demanded him to fold his arms, which eased the pain in his joints but didn’t stop the reverberating. It made him envision fortune cookies crumbling over Amelia’s bloodied body, the breeze creeping through the open windows and nudging the bedroom door against her ankle, a landlord leaving the scene untouched but not before toeing in to collect rent from loose bills left on the kitchen table with an unfinished poker game and take-out in the stage of attracting flies and the rare bold bird.

At the edge of this haze, he laid eyes on the unassuming notebook tucked in the back pocket of the driver’s seat, crowned by a pencil with the motel’s logo on its side. Jittery fingers coaxed the pencil from its cl

jutted to the door, suffering through jerks of the car but unable to straighten along with the rest of his body. The blank page faced him. A shot went off, a scream beckoned him, a request was made, an agape door demanded his push, rain and mud coated his windshield, a lilting voice asked for him over the phone…

Harry tried tucking the notebook back but found his limbs disobeying him. For the rest of the ride, he remained folded into himself. The front seat conversation served as interlude to the humming in his head.

When the Jeep parked in the motel courtyard, Sylvester was in no rush to aid Harry into fresh air. A window had been rotated down and left open. Lionel stepped from the vehicle with the grace of someone who is attending his tenth red carpet event. Sylvester, who, from what Harry had heard, had been put together ever since they left the mountains, shot from the passenger seat and slammed the door. Shock ran through the car and the sound cracked on Harry’s skin.

The slanted window provided Harry with an image of the scenery. An artery pulsed in Sylvester’s neck, a mirage in his otherwise barren body language. It wasn’t enough to steal Harry back to Earth, but it was enough to colour him curious. Saliva flew from Sylvester’s full lips. In the early day’s recovery from night it glimmered as another addition to his jewellery.

Lionel appeared unbothered with his slack jaw and fingers methodically caressing the car keys, but if Sylvester had looked off to Harry at this point, he would have recognised the vacant emotion they both wallowed in.

***

Dinner consisted of staking out at the Blue Diner during happy hour – which was to say every Monday through Saturday, at all hours, and at most of the bars excluding the more luxurious neighbourhoods by the west coast. Dinner meant flicking peanuts into the mouth of whoever had their head to the bar desk, and in turn gobbling up as many as possible.

At the dawn of dinner, Sylvester had raved about his top ten apocalypse meals – neither Harry nor Lionel had offered commentary – and found a cheap variety of lobster on the menu, a solid seventh place on his list. The detailed talk of the finest meal Sylvester had ever eaten (a slice of pineapple pie as a kid) had evoked their stomachs into life, aching after a week of questionable takeout and stripping. Then they had looked around the room.

Among the dining customers were people whose froth had begun frothing down their jawline in the shape of a giant booze-inflicted beard. There hadn’t been much misfortune when the new co-owners of the local motel had fallen through the door, two of them supported by the heftiest of the three, but as the evening grew tired and the sea weakened to a susurration in the wind, more and more raised their finger for a waiter.

If there had ever been waiters in the joint, they had all retired at Matilda’s announcement. Baristas and the odd man off the street took orders and delivered steaks topped with herbs fit to grow among smouldering cigarette butts in the dunes by the dumpster outside. Glasses rose into tiny empires next to ashtrays and vessels of olive oil. By the time the third person raced to the stalls, Sylvester had turned the other cheek.

Dinner for the three of them meant easing into conversation about morality over slaughtered Irish coffees which Harry only accepted since it suffocated his hunger – a conversation that began when Sylvester asked Lionel, “Why did you kill the pilot?”

Lionel, chin to his clasped hands on the table, peering into the foam and cloudy veil of his Irish, said, “Was there another way?”

Harry accepted a toss of peanuts. He blinked to the ceiling as the missed shots rained on his cheeks and clicked against the wood.

“Really depends on your intention, driving up there.”

He could have said, _Did you find a cheaper flight?_ He could have said, _You’ve decided to stay and you don’t need a plane._ He could have said anything else.

Lionel’s sigh was a silent sound in the chatter, but his shoulders lifted with the weight. “Flying home. Sharing a cup of coffee with him. I didn’t want to be stuck on this island. You’re just right where you need to be, but I don’t have a future here.”

“You don’t have a future at all,” Harry said. Lips numb, he smacked them together to test if it was a physical or mental sensation. It took a few moments to realise that he had spoken at all.

Lionel brushed the legs of his stool aside and Harry plummeted to the floor, stealing with him empty shot glasses and cracking the dressing vessel on the terracotta floor. Olive oil sprung over tiles and grooves alike. Lionel took his first sip of Irish coffee with his pinkie hoisted.

“I don’t have a backup plan. When I arrived at my brother’s I would have dumped the scheduling on him. Getting the family together. Ticking off lists. Moving back to the country – that’s what he had planned the last time I heard from him, pre-Vegas. So I would never have to plan any of it, as long as I got back.”

Sylvester said, “I never cared much for mine.”

“Your brother?”

On the floor, Harry squirmed. Carvings bloomed across the bottom of the table top, mirroring the ache in his head and crooked neck from where he rested against the table leg and massive circular foot. And, when he shifted his elbow, pain tickled him from the sharp joint. He moaned, a child’s drowsy lament on the verge of waking from a nightmare.

“My brothers were all right. The three of us were puppets jumping at my parents’ fingertips, and when we were all cut loose they spun their own strings – you hear?”

“And what did you do?”

“I drove down to Las Vegas.”

They knocked glasses and drank. Harry decided to sit with them again. There was nothing volatile in Lionel’s motions and Harry concluded that he must have just been too slow to steady himself on the moving stool. Another bowl of peanuts had been delivered without request, this time with an added cashew selection. Harry idly snacked.

“Vegas was all right,” Sylvester said with an almost conspiratorial look in his eyes, hunched forward now that Lionel had straightened and widened the distance between them. “But we went here still. You’re right, I’m where I want to be, but you aren’t. So, what was the plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Amelia.”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

Salt twanged on Harry’s damaged fingers, unaided by the droplets of booze escaping his mouth. He couldn’t feel his mouth. Couldn’t feel his face. Couldn’t hear the stools whining across the floor as they fell into level with the remembered gunshot. Slices of skin folded back upon delving in for more peanuts and cashews and he kept his fingers circling the depths of the bowl, collecting more shells and more grains and touching the cool glass bottom.

If he could have spoken, he might have said, _I never wanted a brother_.

Lionel must have invited Sylvester to another topic, because now the nose ring bobbed in time with clucking tongues and diminishing alcohol. Ever stiff, Sylvester’s hands didn’t weave out as much as hacked whenever they left their anchored position at his flanks or cupping the drink. His tight-sitting shoulders told off possible participators to his monologue and fended off advances from the gentleman that came in and unpacked his belongings on the bar desk where Harry had just inhaled nuts, that said to pay for everyone’s chance at an hors d’œuvre and then managed to rally a large portion of the customers on a journey to a fountain of youth rumoured to be somewhere on the island. Lionel didn’t go on a tirade about San Borondón, but when Sylvester tried to engage him in such a conversation, he wryly smiled.

“It’s not on me, so we might as well drink,” Lionel said when Sylvester tried once more to breach the subject of the execution. Still Sylvester and Harry both stole glances at his belt and waist, empty. “Stuffed it deep inside a mattress reeking of whoever stayed there before us. Don’t shit yourselves.”

“No lethal accidents?” Harry said.

“It speaks!” Sylvester said, but the comedic effect fell flat.

“She will not be brought up in conversation anymore,” Lionel said, knuckles breathing in reds and whites. “Here we are having such a _good time_ —“

“Oh,” Sylvester said in realisation. “He’s not talking about her. He’s talking about _them_.”

“There’s a ‘them’?”

“Dude was downstairs with two others when we found the motel. Looked kind of shaggy, had this very… I can’t say it was a dad look because he had ferociously more style than any dads I’ve ever known. A wine dad?”

Harry suffocated a retch and pushed aside the bowl of nuts. Some motion returned to him. “He’s not that old, is he?”

“Depends on who _he_ is,” Lionel said, but even as he spoke the interest in his voice ebbed away. Likely the little amount he had assembled had been born out of avoiding Amelia in conversation.

“I quite fancy the motel,” Sylvester said, lathered in an abhorrent Harry accent, then in his own voice, “And it’s not like you’ll be sober for much of it, anyway.”

Harry wanted to say that he was going to stop drinking, that they never would shoot up together, that he would leave them behind as well in favour of bunkering himself into the mountainside if that’s what it took.

Lionel’s voice was a ghost of itself when he said, “It would be nice to settle down.”

“Fuck off. You don’t get a say. You’ve killed two people already this week. Does your ass ever get jealous of the shit that comes out of your mouth?” Harry heaved the glass bowl from the table. Other than the barman’s wearied eyes on him, no one reacted. He took his forehead in hand and fought an impulse to peel his ear open with one of the shards just to

quiet the noise inside. To Sylvester he continued, muted, “It’s just our opinion, now. And I really, very much, would like to get away.”

Lionel stood, slouched and tinkering with the car keys. He resembled a cat with a bird clamped in its maw, both shamefully and delightedly showing it to his owner. Sylvester tensed more from this than from the exploding glass, perhaps calculating whether or not Lionel could have also hidden the gun.

“I’ll be going for a drive,” he said, dusting the last of the foam off his coffee and wiping it from his mouth. The keys clicked in his hand when he walked away. “Don’t wait up.”

Scowling, Sylvester downed the residual liquid and resumed his own drink, the same mindless parade they took part in every night. Harry found himself growing sadder by looking at him.

“Olsson,” he attempted.

“Frankly, I should have the sole right of decision with your logic. My hands are clean. It’s been a ride so far with you two, but if you’re both going to sulk around and kill people…” He cut himself short. “We shouldn’t discuss this now.”

“No. You always want to postpone things. We don’t have the _time_ anymore.” Harry hung his head. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

A hand took his shoulder, damp from the icy drink, pulsating with throttled vigour.

“Die if you want, but try not to. I’ll see you tonight.”

Harry walked into the crackling night.

***

Nick found him on the beach.

Unlike the plan from the better part of Harry’s mind, he ended up lurking in the bar until nightfall. Another fellow had come in, possibly the same brand as he who had sought the fountain of youth, and bought everyone a round, which in Harry’s case had turned into an armada. He enjoyed buying a handful of them and taking one sip of each before waiting, scanning the surroundings, taking five sips more.

The ringing had stopped after a while. He couldn’t remember what had terrified him about it. It was only noise.

Thus, nightfall had come with giggling cicadas and an unfurling ocean and Harry’s boots cleaved caked sand to the side in a stride. At one point, he had fucked around with a fat stick plucked from the bushes further inland, squeezing its imagined trigger, snorting with fruitless laughter. _Bang bang_. He had silenced himself by wedging it between his teeth, weighting on his tongue. After that he had launched it as far into the ocean as he could, sweating with the memory of metal in his hand.

The mocha boots sulked along the shoreline. As his feet bit deep, he swung his arms in wide bows, navigating despite the resistance on the deserted beach. He would have expected one or two bonfires, a children’s set of spades and buckets, a troubadour with his hat tilted to the skies.

But no one was there to observe him. So Harry stopped where the water seeped into his boots and braced himself for the scream he had felt bubbling for hours. Nothing came. With nothing lost or gained, Harry turned to walk home again, slipping out of his shoes and

allowing the sand to grow between his toes. If he saw a payphone on the way back (did those still exist? Had they ever existed here?), or a hotline number blasted over a billboard ( _“Yes, hello, I’d like to book a seat on the next rocket launch. Am I talking to the right Sir?”_ ), he would take it as a sign. He had been in the wrong.

The cold caught up with his soles when he gave in to the sand and let it soak him. Grains of salt and stone tinged the hairs on his legs. Fresh smells of barbecue stung his eyes, the kind that grows more heavenly the farther away you are, which flavour is elicited by its burnt crust. From the night floated drunken song, but Harry was just sobering up.

Balloons budded from the sparsely chiselled pillars of a terrace above the embankment. No one presently inflated them or tied them up, but the music soared from a moving body of people indoors. Coal glistened in the maws of a grill on the terrace, unattended to and perilously close to setting fire to the strings tying the balloons down, which someone indoors seemed to notice and then seemed to turn the other cheek to.

As Harry watched garlands whipping in the smoke, he tasted the joy that filled the building. It could have wounded him immensely, to perceive such elation at the end of the world, and it might have if he hadn’t chosen to walk away, light-headed and swarming with thoughts.

While he journeyed on, he began to tremble. Although there had been many nights chilly as this one, he couldn’t remember feeling this cold. The laughter surged behind him and he realised that it was because its owners had left the terrace and followed in his washed-away footsteps. Turning, he saw Alexa, saw George, saw Nick, hoisting glasses to the moonlight while the music faded but their voices carried the lost rhythms. Alexa had garlands weaved into her hair, which seemed to tug her towards the burnt steaks and comfort they had left behind.

Harry had no intention of initiating conversation, but his feet sank deeper into the sand until they stranded him near the shoreline. The laughter ceased to haunt him. The party had stopped by a bench on the boardwalk overflowing with trash and edibles, still hot to the touch. He didn’t dare to turn and watch them. They must have seen him. Must have read him straight off the bat.

Harry was facing the ocean when Nick strolled up to him. The neck of a gaudy wine bottle clinked against Nick’s rings, and at times against his seashell necklace. Nick swept aside a paper-thin scarf to greet with a handshake or wave, but did neither.

“Old friend,” Nick said, his voice carrying the intent of continuing whereas his demeanour spoke differently. Then, when Harry didn’t move away, Nick slung an arm over his shoulder so that the dry fruity soul of the wine blended with the sea air. Harry rearranged the grip on his shoes.

“I found the garlands,” Harry said, “And the balloons. But something is burning on your grill, which threw me off guard.”

“Were you looking or did you stumble across it?”

“I thought you would have cooked more after you were fired, honed your skills.”

“What? You’re saying you’ve been driving, then? Thought your license had been withdrawn.”

Nick’s arm fell from his shoulder as Harry stepped forward, shoes softly clicking while moonlight hewed their mocha.

“Dance,” Nick said, but his tone offered options. As if to cover up the fallacy, he took another swig of wine.

The laughter had picked up again, soberer, and somewhere beyond continued the terrace music. Harry began swaying, briefly considering tying his laces together and carry his boots like a medallion before his composure whittled away in chuckles and his knees threatened to cave. So, Nick took over, waddling forward, and seeing this wobbly walk and the pedalling of arms for balance, Harry wondered if his toes didn’t sport blisters. Those sandals looked awfully abrasive.

“Ignore all of our birthdays for a moment,” Nick said, “It might take some pressure off. I’ll speak for George and me both, that neither of us expect any presents. Well, George might, come to think of it. And frankly I wouldn’t mind, but what would mean more than anything is if you could be there.”

“You look ridiculous,” Harry said, but his comment did little to hinder.

“I hope you know that I don’t blame you for any of it, anymore. I hope it’s not some end-of-the-world bullshit, either. But I’ve been thinking about you and how much I loved you. Let a man dream.”

Nick had reached him and now fought to hold Harry’s gaze, hands nearly clasping his shoulders in need. It was more difficult to hold his composure when Nick wasn’t parodying himself.

“Just me?”

“Mostly you. You’re the one that got away. And I don’t want to die without having reconciled with you.” Nick paused to drink and something clicked in him. “Everything we do now will be some end-of-the-world bullshit, won’t it?”

Nick tipped the rim to Harry’s lips and he drank.

“If you want to, you can still blame me today. Tomorrow as well. But Harry, at some point you won’t have to. And you can just pop in and say hi to Pixie and Alexa and—“

“Are they waiting for you to ask me out?” Harry said with a nod to George and Alexa, who delightedly waved back.

“Do you want to come back with me?”

Nick reached a hand out for emphasis in place of the wine, but despite the humour in his face a solemn tone clung to it.

Harry should have gone to see them. He had let bad blood cleave a ravine between them in his effort to create distance from Nick. Pixie was a mother. Aimee was maybe one to several.

“I wouldn’t forgive me if I was in your shoes,” he admitted, fingers tingling for Nick’s peace offering in the swollen night. “If I were in your position, I’d run. Drown myself in the sea. Only thing you’ve missed out on is getting drunk on the beach.”

Nick took his hand, effortlessly felt the marks of aging memories on the skin, patterns he had covered before, and said, “I’ve been getting plenty of drunk in too many places. Haven’t you thought about how there’s no way to fail anymore? Whatever you’re going for, there’s meant to be success somewhere.”

“What if I don’t deserve to take any shots?”

“You don’t need to carry that pity. I still want you. Pix is mad to see you. The past isn’t modelling you – you can have whichever amount of shots you need to get it right.”

Shoes, scarf and wine bottle lumping on the sand, they sauntered along the coastline, barely moving past the sea sighing in the pitch black and the spotlights from inland tennis courts diving between their shadows. It was hard enough to see one’s own feet when the light only selectively peeled away the black; it was a feat to recognise distance travelled without looking up to the restaurants and hotels.

Harry said, “Everyone is coming to see you, from what I’ve heard. My absence wouldn’t be too harsh. You’ll have a blast.”

“Is there anything I can do so you’ll want to see me again?”

Harry shook his head; his steps felt weighted. “If I have any shots left, I want to take it easy. The guys and I have a plane to fix and then I’ll make do with sunset strolls or crossword puzzles. It’s a part of life I’ve never had time to try, unlike you.”

“Yeah, I do fancy me some tea in the morning.”

Harry found himself walking onwards while Nick fell behind him in silence. He couldn’t tell how far he was going, how far they had gone together. The beach smelt of uncertainty, a twang of smoke from the bonfire he had been looking for but couldn’t yet see. He told himself he would turn around and look at Nick.

He didn’t turn until he heard, “I’ll have a plane later this week if you or your mates want it.”

Upon whence he found himself a handful of yards away from Nick and walking back.

“Didn’t know you could ease planes out your arse,” Harry said. “Must be something you learnt being unemployed.”

“Well, the others are flying over here, aren’t they? The plan could stay here on the island or it could fly back to England.”

“The States,” Harry corrected before realising he was sealing his fate.

Nick swelled with the response, brows lifting and dropping seven years of doubt. In an inquiry of self-reassurance, he said, “You’ll have to stick around.”

Farther inland, Alexa and George had had enough of wooing and kicking sand and had piled together by the abandoned clothes and wine.

Harry watched as Nick’s wandering hands settled in the pockets of his shorts – they couldn’t be his shorts, with how washed-out and unadorned they were; he must have pulled them last-minute from a staff’s closet in the resort – and the seashell necklace resting on his hairy chest.

“Guess I’ll have to,” he said.


	5. Illness

**17 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 4th, illness**

“One option is this beautiful villa near Girocante – view of the ocean, view of some unfinished next-gen houses crammed into the hillside, which honestly isn’t all too pleasant since most of them are graffitied blocks of concrete. Depends on your fancy of south or north. The south side has only the ocean. The elderly couple I spoke to warmly recommended the hiking trail, or they might’ve. My Spanish is rusty.”

“Oh, if there’s a hiking trail we must have it!”

Sylvester eyed him wryly while sliding over a new pamphlet. His unoccupied hand gently tugged at his nose ring.

“Your mockery isn’t appreciated,” he said. “Another option would be this tower house in the centre of Baledo—“

“And where are we now?”

“ _Besa mi culo_ , Harry Styles.”

“Your mother taught you that one, didn’t she?”

“And yours kindly gave you that shit-eating grin and wonky eyes. How many times did she drop you on the head – five?”

Through his laughter, Harry gave him the finger. It was easier to laugh than to think.

Sylvester said, head high, “In its outskirts. Follow along on your map.”

Harry had been handed a map before Sylvester had even sat down with him in the reception. It had been a flurry of rain on a lost-and-found raincoat two sizes too XL and papers crimped inside folders that would have had Lionel wetting himself, before a chair had been withdrawn and a number of leaflets had fallen onto the table. The aura of hot thyme and sandalwood gave away his whereabouts before Harry could ask. Nonetheless, Sylvester had dumped a batch of incense and a second-hand beginner’s handbook (in Spanish with notes in English left by the previous owner or the shop owner) on the table.

“Baledo might be known for its luxury-leaning resorts, but there are some tower houses for regular folk like us, even in the centre. Not a lot of unfinished projects here, but nature is evident in the many parks and green areas in town.”

Harry regarded him, thumb wedged between his teeth, spacing out.

“You don’t actually have any idea what you’re saying. Either you’re pulling it straight from your ass or—“

“Found Lionel sleeping on top of all of these when I got back from the bar.” Sylvester motioned to the brochures. “Woke him up and he wouldn’t stop talking about it.”

Harry wanted to keep flirting with offence but the forthcoming words soured in his mouth.

“And not only trivia,” Sylvester said, “But honest, thought-out information. The size of the places, the nearby food markets. He assessed areas based on population, maybe looking for empty shacks to investigate. You know his penchants.”

“I know that I went back to the flat the day before yesterday. No one had been there since we left.”

Sylvester sat back. A trembling voice climbed from his faltering mouth. “Hadn’t realised you were a masochist.”

“Not even empty shacks would make a difference now. If they mattered, he would have never settled in the motel. Does he care about anything anymore?”

“Right before our first night together, the three of us in the Grand, you’d fallen asleep on a shoddy park bench while Lionel and I had taken turns browsing the slots. Some dude tried to piss on you— Like I said, I was on my way back, wasn’t gone for long, wouldn’t have let anything rain on you. But he never had the chance – do you recall?”

Harry did. He felt the nubby side of the beginner’s handbook to incense, the pages various brands of thick and damp and curled against the binds.

“Lionel picked up on it as well,” Sylvester said. “I hope you know that.”

“He doesn’t give a shit like you do.”

“You were completely incoherent for the first few minutes. Dude must have been more or less sober, because if he’d been hammered we think you two would have gotten along brilliantly. But you were talking about your sister.”

“Nightmares,” Harry uttered, but the comment felt futile, its aftertaste poisoning his palate.

Sylvester’s hands folded out from his middle. _This is what I’m talking about._ “That’s where I feel he’s headed now.”

More out of habit than anything, Harry sought an escape in the stacks of once vivid brochures, in the faded print where a young couple had just parked a car and elatedly overlooked the scenery. When Harry would later go to visit the neighbourhood, he’d see none of its former glory, or the streaks of natural pleasure that might have conjured such a mirage.

“Get the gun,” Sylvester said.

“Where is he?”

“Sleeping. Roaming around town.”

“Then there’s no rush.”

Sylvester jutted fists of incense towards him, an opposition. “Bring some of these upstairs.”

Harry cramped the pillars between his fingers and left the brochures in the past. The wind hissed outside, urging him on.

“I would be fine,” he said. “Staying here.”

Sylvester’s voice was soft when he answered, “I figured as much.”

Sand grained Harry’s vision as he headed upstairs, searching for a hint of bonfire in the air, a trace of charcoal tipped onto the beach after a failed roast. The grains ticked his nostrils and bore sea salt into scratches he couldn’t recall having amassed. He took his time, knowing he would stand indecisive outside Lionel’s room for a while.

The wind had time to die and reveal the sounds of the beach before he made up his mind – lone rangers picked up trash next to families smearing each other with sunscreen, birds vacating these skies for the mountains, a pack of kids kicking ball.

Harry focused on these sounds and kept his eyes on the wall before him when reaching into Lionel’s mattress. He touched metal. The room smelt damply of watered-down weed.

Harry closed his eyes and withdrew the gun.

***

Contrary to his previous visit, the Mandala Wellness Resort breathed emptiness. Windows had been propped open and the remaining curtains drawn aside – a case of charred satin hung across the front entrance railing when Harry trudged up, sunglasses slick and car keys bristling a little less in his hand with each step. The cracked brick steps took his feet diligently and the door swayed open with a glance.

Through the open windows on the other side of the hall, Alexa reclined by the poolside, her hair knotted in a mess of red and white paisley patterns. Against her shoulder rested a wooden broom.

Harry began to move. The closer he got, the more leaves he saw curling against the fence surrounding the perimeter and the more the red mess assembled a tablecloth torn to mercy. The stereo had been moved from the terrace to near block the entrance to the pool where Harry sidled through, clapping his thigh to the Spanish rhythm.

“Alexa!” he said.

She cracked an eye open, registered him, then hoisted a mojito in greeting.

“Harry! Fancy joining me for a drink?”

He sat down without hesitation. Her voice made him feel warm in a way the Mediterranean sun couldn’t.

“How does life by the ocean compare to New York?” he asked as she shared her drink.

“Not a single moment of silence. This is the—“

She broke off in coughs, creeping at first, then scathing. Harry gave her time to recover.

“This is the last one I’ll have, I suspect. But, you know.” She gestured to the homemade bandana flopping on her head. “I’ve never been one to decline a few good nights out. All that was left in the kitchen here was some soggy brown salad and these bad boys.”

Next to her stood a bucket of sweating ice from which cava and Captain Morgan’s white rum spiked. Harry hadn’t noticed until she patted its side.

“Feel how the sea is beckoning you?” she asked and started across her crossed feet at the poolside. Her voice had been reduced to a rasp unaided by the alcohol. “Feels like these two weeks will bring a lot of ticks to my bucket list. They ought to serve some sort of culmination, don’t they? Given the hell of a build-up they’ve had.”

“I was just looking for the man of the feast.”

“Your man? He’s out chatting up locals. Trying to find a sword swallower, last time I heard from him.”

Harry stole another swig of mojito to wash down the bitter taste crowning. “He must have forgotten to mention that.”

“Got a lot of ideas to juggle in that head of his,” Alexa said. “Even though he’s used to it, keeping that much afloat must take its toll. That’s why George and I are here.”

Harry didn’t have the energy to delve into that side quest.

“You sure are doing fine research,” he said with a look.

Alexa picked the sunglasses from his nose, poising them on her own. She tilted her chin to the sun. “Taking a well-deserved break. See the foyer behind you?”

Harry craned back with squinted eyes.

“Since breakfast I’ve dusted out all these piles of glass and leaves and gotten rid of cobwebs. Graffiti is still left, though.”

“It’s still breakfast for me,” Harry muttered as he got up. “Tell Nick I’m looking for him if he pops by, but it will probably be too late by then.”

Alexa waved him goodbye.

***

The more frequent murders were wearing on Harry. 

He felt it as he, on his way into town, braked at a

rsation during their stay on the island. But Harry’s guts didn’t advise him to drive up there. No, they advocated for the slums of gambling and liquor, albeit without the neon, but with all the more thrills. Sylvester had said that this environment must be even more enthralling for his big city vices, had said that it had added an element of uncertainty certainly unheard of in casinos. Harry hadn’t thought about it. He supposed Sylvester had said this because, unlike Lionel, he didn’t spend most of his time awake seeking thrills and could thus spend the time saved analysing Lionel’s behaviour.

Curses roared in the besieged streets. Harry tried manoeuvring into an empty pocket by the pavement, irking bystanders pilgrimaging from their homes to observe the din.

Shouts – premonitions, given their timbre – pummelled him while he reversed the Jeep. Someone brandished a cross through his car window. He rolled it up and banished large portions of exhaust. With his knuckles ironed on the steering wheel, he threw an arm up in frustration, swept it through the air in a _get out of my way_ motion. Something was burning in the distance. Not an ideal environment for a gambler prowling in neon-leaded backstreets, but that’s what made Harry’s hands jerk the car into parking. They’d already lost one night of poker to Lionel’s absence.

One of the men with the crosses caught on to his lack of understanding. The man’s throat clucked, words frothing at his mouth, until, muffled through the closed car window—

“Who will save you, Sir?”

Harry hopped in his seat, further tucking the blouse into his waistline in hopes of concealing the gun. He searched for alleyways wide enough to fit the car. Leaving it here, exposed, didn’t sit well with him. Neither did abandoning Lionel.

Harry got out of the car and shoved the car keys down with the gun, soaking through denim in the gritty sun.

“These houses won’t shelter you,” the man kept on. “His will must be abided as He has faith in us. For after this He will cause it to rain on the Earth forty days and forty nights, and He will destroy from the face of the Earth all living things that He has made.”

“Do you have a pamphlet, or something? Something concise and on the go?”

“Where is your ark? Only those in the ark will remain alive.”

“Get a pamphlet,” Harry said.

Lionel smoked a fag against the door of a pub a few minutes away. Its ceiling drooped as if it had carried too much water, but the pipes and empty cartons stacked outside spoke of little but dust. He gave nods to tricksters cracking cards in their hands or rattling chips in plastic bags that looked to have contained nuts or dried fruit in the past when they passed through the unguarded door.

Even at this distance, Harry recognised the profoundly sunken shoulders and chapped fingers around the cigarette.

Harry very nearly thought Lionel would fall into his arms as he looked up from his gaze sloped along the ground.

“How’s it feeling?” Harry asked.

Lionel flicked the butt away, head lolling and arms folded. Below his torn shorts, a gash had been bared, incriminating his assembled façade.

“One’s tired as shit,” Lionel said.

“Did you win anything?”

“I always win. It’s about perspective.” He shrugged at the question in Harry’s eyes. “I’m out here moping because I’ll never see snow again.”

“Never thought I’d hear anyone missing snow.”

“It’s barely on TV,” Lionel complained, “And there’s no way any locals will provide some for me. I’d have reckoned the mountains would have some in store – don’t know what was going through my head. Only luck I’ll have is if some misguided tourists came trundling down the beach one day, loading buckets of ice for some ungodly purpose. I only stayed in Vegas for a few months before I met you. My entire bloodline are Wisconsinites, except for my old man.”

“That’s not a real word,” Harry said while wondering if Lionel had been up in the mountains this entire time, patience running thin while scavenging. “Have you killed anyone else these past few days?”

Lionel snorted. “Are you projecting?” Then he said, “I fucking wish. Let’s… It’s time to go back, isn’t it?”

Harry nodded. “Sure.” The gun clammed to his naked skin. His blouse was becoming sheerer.

Lionel ducked back inside the shack and returned a minute later with tiny cava like stalactites from his palms. His gait was as slanted as his grip on the bottles while they scouted for the Jeep. It made it seem as if he had spent hours sat half on a seat and half up on the wall, perception distorted by the gloom.

Harry put in his best effort to gently urge and plough way for them through the crowd. Meanwhile, Lionel fished a ziplock of coke from his breast pocket.

***

The ride home was spent flinging powder from the dashboard and eyes of the driver. One can only drive so far, Harry realised, with cocaine poised on his arm and on the vital organs of the car, without longingly and gradually slowing down and sniffing a line.

Eventually he caved and they pulled over into a pocket along the dirt road. Which wasn’t saying much, seeing as all irregularities in the road could be counted as pockets. They kept the radio low, until it disappeared in static and Harry switched it off. Once, he remembered, the sound had knifed his ears.

“Before the island,” Harry started, “I had this idea of redeeming myself. Um, wiping the slate clean in a more grandiose way than I’m doing now.”

“Before snorting coke off the hood of a stolen car.” The way Lionel said it made it clear that he had been bothered by it a longer time. “No way you’ve been born and raised sniffing. Look at your scotch-free elbows, those white-fence teeth. Your cheeks are swelling with _utter adoration_ from a mild upbringing. Bet your folks were craftsmen or bankers or something. Preschool teachers!”

“Yeah, but…” Harry took a philosophical pause and gleaned out the windshield. “Isn’t the love within your family mutual?”

“Sure thing, sure thing.” Lionel let a finger fall to his temple as if he knew governmental secrets. “Observant there. But my ma got hooked on sleeping pills and pops shared his

drinking habit with my brother. I looked at them and realised I didn’t want to become either, so I hit Vegas with some guys. It turned into an annual pilgrimage.”

Now Harry had his arms hooked over the front seat – Lionel had positioned himself in the back. “Have you ever gambled away something dear to you?”

“My aunt’s horse.” Then Lionel cracked a laugh. “Fuck, that’d have been something. Never really had that problem.”

“Having the profession that you have?”

“You grew up on a farm, in a rectory, by a cookie-breathing oven. Something, right? We had a family restaurant my pops governed. Began taking out the trash before I hit double-digits and wiped down tables when I was ten-something. Graduated to dishwasher but never made it to cook. I’m not much for taking up a pan and spatula.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Harry said.

“’Killed by a celebrity’,” Lionel said, picking his head up in a grimace, “Now that’s something I can get on. Could’ve never been made possible until the end of the world, though.”

Harry glanced out the window – the road they were on a string of dirt through the fruity landscape.

“Debatable,” he said.

It had been half a Gemma thing, half a Harry thing, and so he felt he owed her half of the secret, though she was not around to tell it.

Lionel tossed an arm over his face, the freckles on his forehead magnified by the chaste sun, replacements for droplets of blood. A groan tore from his throat. Harry wished someone had bought a beer to bring with.

“Sylvester will be all on my ass when we get back. Fucking hen.”

Where Sylvester obsessed over Lionel, Harry obsessed over routine. On this corner, he fathomed why Sylvester had stirred up a fuss with only the two of them at the poker table. It was no secret that this agenda they had crafted over the past months was crumbling. Harry tried bracing himself for it, chasing a solution that wouldn’t plunge him into the chasm of past and present.

“I’m getting you a plane, you know. You’re going home. And you and I are going to outlive this.”

“Not today, I ain’t. You ever wondered why they only ever sent up two spacecrafts to her?”

Harry turned to the steering wheel and jumpstarted the engine, palms slick. Dust dislodged from the seats and drifted about in the drooping sunshine as Lionel heaved himself up. They rolled onto the road.

“Honestly,” he said. “Only people who could have made more happen is the government, but they didn’t do it because they already had a vessel themselves.”

“You’re not foolish enough to believe that.”

Fingers curled around the headrest of the driver’s seat and an elbow poked out at Harry’s side, around which the cuffs on Lionel’s shirt bundled with its damp wrinkles. It had been ironed at some point, but now creased like the sea at night. Looping his thumb into Harry’s hair, Lionel cracked in a smile.

“You know, with how fast you’re speaking, I’d have thought the old cat at your farm got your tongue. Latest reports say two loads of them have already been shipped off – at least one other is on the way, boarding. I bet they left the Pope behind.”

Harry softly braked, crept along the road.

Up ahead walked a drapery of design makes and tourist treasures. The jumble of palm tree patterns and tiger stripes culminated in concrete blocks for shoes, without the sleek edge of haute couture. As the Jeep drew nearer, Harry could determine them as a less ghastly adaptation of crocs in their build, but not in their colour.

“Mate, get the coke away.” Harry had spoken, but even as he felt his jaw shift, he didn’t hear the words.

“My coke?”

“Get it off my dashboard!”

“ _Your_ dashboard?”

Lionel crawled to it with a faulty hand-to-eye coordination that disturbed the gearshift and rattled the Jeep for a few yards before stabilising. An articulate sniff got the job done. Lionel blew at the remains; they soared across the windshield and tangled at Harry’s arm like sea salt.

Lionel fell back in the backseat.

“I hope we die,” he said, laughing. “I’ll be back before nightfall.”

The car stopped.

The man had yet to turn, so Harry jerked the inside mirror, the sunlight cracking across his face, and dusted the cocaine off himself. He just stopped from smelling himself, realising it mattered little and that he would be, at least, the second most aromatic person in the car. But he couldn’t keep the hand from delving into his hair, running, running, stilling.

He forgot to smile when the passenger door opened.

Nick compensated with a dazzling grin.

“Lacking daily occupations, have you started harbouring homeless people in the backseat of your car?” he asked, then drew Harry’s gaze forward again with a finger to his chin when his head snapped back.

Initially looking to the seat, Harry found Lionel storming back towards town in the window, with a bit of a limp in his step. Harry bent back and shut the door, which was agape and with a tuck-and-roll mark in the malleable dirt peeking in its gap.

Turning back ahead, Harry found Nick dampening his fingers to taste the scraps of white dust on the dashboard.

“God,” Nick said, gathered some on his finger and sniffed. “Do you want to get him back or should we drive home? I could do with either.”

The combination of his garments was every bit as dreadful as Harry had made them out to be before.

“The fucking ass,” Harry gritted.

They drove.


	6. In the Nick of time

**17 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 4th, in the Nick of time**

Nick had brought a sack with him into the Jeep and now, on a counter in the newly dusted kitchen of the Mandala Wellness Resort, he emptied it out ceremoniously. Microphones, multi-coloured chords, user’s manuals in Spanish (which also helpfully supplied English titles) and a narrow collection of records, which had been pirated by the looks of the irate pink and yellow-striped skirts of the photographs.

“And this we can carry flower pots or palm trees in,” Nick said and shoved the sack to the side, spilling a trail of dirt from its maw. Along with it he also dumped a pocket-sized Spanish-English dictionary.

“It should be obvious,” Harry said. “Maybe it shouldn’t. But why?”

“Karaoke night, _obviously_ ,” Nick said, hand clutching Harry’s shoulder as he looked upon his collection with proud eyes. “Wasn’t going to purchase these today, but turns out I could only get so far with my knowledge.”

“Funny – I remember one of the first things I was taught in school was how to ask, ‘Where do you keep the karaoke equipment?’”

“In French,” Nick said.

“In French,” Harry confirmed.

“That’s decided then: you’ll come with me next time and maybe the two of us can work up some results. The plan today was to check out the local flavours, get some professional input regarding the party and Collette’s and Alexa’s hiking trails, surfing spots, beach volley grounds, and of course the wonderful island cuisine.”

“I don’t think Alexa is feeling too well.”

She still sat by the poolside, although now in new attire. The bucket of iced alcohol had grown significantly emptier. Hopping onto the kitchen counter, Harry gained leverage to see George doing laps in the water, pausing at the camp by Alexa’s feet to sip a Corona. Nick’s hand fell to Harry’s knee.

“Alexa!” Nick cried and a mustered _Yeah?!_ came from the loungers. Through the windowpanes, her toes shifted, either in lieu with her reply or to disband water splashed by George. “Would you be up for some singing later tonight?” Another _Yeah!_ , less pensive.

“Better do some lines as well, before Pregnant Pepsi gets here.”

“Pixie is pregnant? I thought she’d already had hers.”

“Another one on the way! Due in November. Do you have any more or did you snort everything off your dash?”

For the first time that afternoon, Harry felt as if Nick waited for his answer. The hand on his knee pulsed, more as to hold back from doing other things than to remain for comfort.

“Might be some more back at the motel, but I don’t have any on me. I’m trying to lay off.”

Nick reached across his body, opening one of the fridges. Although Harry didn’t have time to smell it, he saw it in Nick’s twisted face, saw it in the pool of brown liquid at the bottom of the fridge and the slit bag of salad crumpled against the shelf.

“I ought to go grocery shopping,” Nick said. “You want to tag along? It’ll be tapas or pizza, depending on how much those two out there are willing to prepare.”

Harry grabbed the pocket-sized dictionary. “Let’s go.”

***

That night they ended up with more wine and fewer bowls than could hold the creative tapas ingredients. The kitchen had been some parts a battle ground and some parts an art studio during different times of the evening. Harry had come in and out of it, dolloping his finger in salsa and sneaking a scallop from George’s life-giving fingers. Nick had put him to work by grabbing his shoulders and suggesting all the plating to be done but had since sought his kicks elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Harry envisioned the rest of the gang joining in, welcoming him back with open arms and full glasses and catch him up on the latest events, the major milestones, take the salon floor in stride and talk the dawn of a new world. It wasn’t fully as glorious as imagined. Nothing was these days. His expectations fizzled as the evening passed and they all ended up in the ballroom in various states of sobriety.

“Get some Britney on!” George requested. He spooned salsa onto his shell, crowning a mountain of olives he had proudly concocted in the art studio.

The only one with a microphone was Alexa. She had seized it before sitting down for a drink. While the rest strew about the room in various states of sobriety and dinner, she hooped the cord around her arm and pointed the mike at each of them, in turn.

“Who wants to get their Britney on?” she said. She rasped, and Harry brushed it off as a dry throat and handed her water.

Nick stepped up to the challenge. “Do we have boas? Did I forget the boas?”

Among the crumbs and smears of sauce and spilt mojitos and wax shifting along candle hips, George found a calendar, unscathed by the dinner’s vivacity. It contained crossed out dates and markings Harry couldn’t differentiate in the blue shine of the telly.

“We won’t be picking up fabrics until the… seventh? Sixth? Boas, new sheets, washing sheets, extra curtains and tablecloths. No, the sheet-washing is tomorrow. Never mind! Don’t listen to me.”

“Are we buying new curtains?”

“Yeah, I wrote that in,” Alexa said, rising onto her toes as if she could discern the list in the calendar. “Don’t know what the curtains in the suites are like, but these are terrible. Ghastly. They smell a bit like your first flat.”

Hoisting a chair across the room, Nick got up to string the curtain off the rod, saying, “Then I’m taking these. If we paint it, it’s basically already a boa. An activity for tomorrow’s hangover.”

It resembled more a scarf as it drooped down his back.

Harry had never been to Nick’s first flat, but from the pictures he had been shown, this sultry rot of smoke wouldn’t have been an anomaly.

With the 50s satin swelling on his shoulders, Nick said, “You can have this if you win.”

Alexa pressed start.

As their movements progressed into physical aggression, albeit not executed towards one another, some remaining cobweb shook in the nooks. Harry discovered a box of matches and lit up the candle-dappled table.

“What’s with the calendar?” he asked, crooked over the fire.

“It contains all the planning he will ever need,” George said. “I don’t know how we hadn’t thought of it before, but we are mashing our birthday parties into one. You have

shopping lists, bulletins of people to call or to meet, routes to avoid, times, times, times, precautions to take and things that might be fucked up and how we should go about solving them.”

“Like,” Harry said, rolling the word out on his tongue, resting it on the tip while dissecting the jumble of notes – unmistakeably Nick’s with some of Alexa’s professional scrawl. “A sword swallower suddenly packing his bags and fucking off the island?”

“Something like that.” George gleamed. “Weather conditions aren’t really included, other than hellish downpour. This is our baby.” And he patted the calendar.

As Harry regarded it in flickering light and George crunching tapas across from him, he could do little but look away. The world kept moving. Alexa cheered as she won. And Harry could do little but look away.

Alexa mimicked his deep bow when proposing the other microphone. Half of her hair was curtain. “Are you up next?”

He said, “Guess I fucking am.”

Over the course of eleven songs and half as many drinks, Harry saw to it to strike up conversation with Nick.

“This afternoon, on the dashboard of my car,” he said.

“What about this afternoon, on the dashboard of your car?” Nick asked.

Nick had lost, reclaimed and once more lost the boa, so now he twirled a finger into the flecked tablecloth. And he no longer wore a tourist’s lost and found outfit, but something from his own closet somewhere. Though the garments were new to Harry, he recognised the streaks of Nick in them. They were so sure in their purpose, just as Nick’s finger twirled with precision, just as Nick’s knee bumped the table out of time with the Beach Boys’ anthem crooning from the telly. A trick of light enhanced his stubble.

“I can’t remember,” Harry said. He stood and his feet took him away.

On his way to the poolside, he declined a duet by advocating fresh air. They let him go. Another song started up when the door shut behind him, sound flowing from a sliver unstifled, but muted, like he had left behind a universe.

All the lights beneath the water were dead. When Harry peered into the pool, his outline peered back without expression. He crouched, dared himself to touch the water and flinched at its chill and in fear of something touching him in return.

Christmas lights spanned in the trees between massive spotlights poised at the corners of the pool closest to the fence. Must have been Alexa’s handiwork.

The sliver in the doorway burst open, and the sounds hung in the air for a bit before diminishing anew. Nick sat down beside him, barefoot and fearless of the pool’s creatures.

“I taught Alexa some stage design secrets,” Nick said. “If you look closely, you can see the passion that went into making these poles, the craftsmanship.”

Harry looked closely. Meanwhile, Nick gauged the spotlights.

“Which stages did you do?” Harry asked.

“Nothing at the O2. I started out properly, I’d say, when Alexa let me drop by her London office like twice a week, hammer some nails, paint some wood. Did some exhibits for Miranda’s and minor galas. Nothing _fancy_.” But he said it in such a way that crinkled Harry’s eyes and put his hand in the pool water. Next to his fingers, Nick’s toes wiggled. _See? We’re all right._

“I take pride in my work,” Nick said. “One of my favourite pieces I built for Alexa’s wedding. Yeah,” he interrupted himself, “It ended gracefully and she’s now as single as you remember her. I built this proper spiky thing, but it wasn’t harsh or anything. I swept in some nice colours and textures. Used this porcelain-like material for the whole thing. Well, it was porcelain, so it maintained all the qualities of it but took on a rougher look without requiring the maintenance. Perfect contrasts with the bride and groom. And when I was finishing it up in the studio, I swear I just sat for about half an hour touching the surface. Pixie’s watching my laptop at home. She should be able to send you pictures of it, if you haven’t seen it already.”

“I got rid of my phone,” Harry said. “Pre-island.”

“Notifications got you bad?”

“I didn’t want to be reachable.” Harry withdrew from the water. “Now I wish I’d kept it. Sorry.”

“Maybe I’ll just whip something together here, then,” Nick said, “Something to remember. Are your hands cold?”

Harry looked down at his fingers. Dead chunks, frayed by the heat and chlorine that once was, peeled from the skin. Nick took them in his hand.

“What’s up with your calendar?” Harry asked.

“That old thing. I don’t want to mess anything up – forget to call someone or get the wrong sort of flowers. It’s been – how long was it since the announcement? I might’ve started planning some weeks before they launched Deliverance. I’m still planning, kind of listing what I won’t be able to fit in during these days.”

“Like a last will.”

“You weren’t always part of that plan. I wanted you to be, but you had been gone for so long that my perception of you had distorted, and when I would dream sometimes, I’d add those thoughts to my memories.”

“ _Those_ dreams?” Harry said.

“No. No, just like us walking Pig and Stinky, or us at Christmas. Us cooking.”

Harry disengaged from Nick’s grasp. “But you put me in the calendar, after a while?”

“Well, Harry, I’d have never come to this island if you hadn’t been here. Alexa kept tabs on you because I couldn’t— I wasn’t in a good place. Now I don’t think you were, either. But you’re worth a magnificent ending – therefore, you’re in the calendar.”

Harry heard a confession cusped on Nick’s lips. He said, “I could use a bed to crash in.”

“Already or later?”

“I think I’ve had my spoonful of old memories tonight. Ought to save some for the morning. What are the plans for tomorrow?”

Decayed bits of flora stuck to Nick’s bared legs when he withdrew from the water, stepping in place on the stone patio to shake the largest beads off. For a moment Harry prepared for an arm to come over his shoulders, but Nick kept his distance as they walked inside.

Alexa and George had brought out shot glasses of various makes and sizes, which George now piled atop each other while singing along to the Spice Girls with lacklustre commitment. Even Alexa had given up on the microphones. Now she spread out a deck of

cards between her and George, ticking off another mark on a napkin – if she was keeping scores, it looked as if George had the lead by a handful.

“Are you packing?” Alexa said as Harry came through the door.

Harry recalled the gun in his trousers. He adjusted it.

“I’m going to bed, actually,” he said.

“And I’m going to show him where, but I’ll be back,” said Nick.

George held a fist out in passing, glittering of salt and clutching a slice of lime. While Nick lifted a hand to decline for the both of them, Harry ducked in to lick it off, took a mouthful of citrus, and downed the ceramic shot glass provided to him. It seared along the flanks of his tongue, cluttered in the back of his throat.

He gestured to it in vexed bewilderment, posture churned.

“Yeah, I don’t know what this is,” George admitted. “Found this tiny bottle with a peeling label in one of the cupboards. At first, we suspected it to be tequila—”

“It’s not,” Harry rasped.

“Both of us have had some while you were out, so it’s nothing traumatising. Means Nick’s the only one left.” And he flicked salt onto his other hand, the one not shimmering with crystals melted from Harry’s tongue, and offered it up to Nick.

“It’s bedtime for this young man,” Nick said and took Harry’s head under his arm, “But save some for when I come back down. Sounds like a bloody good time.”

Harry cleared his throat – it still fizzled down there, somewhere, everywhere.

As they journeyed up marble staircases and towards quarters with a view of the sea – requested, between coughs and deep breaths – Nick said, “Tomorrow I was thinking about inviting your mates over for a little get-together. And we have work to do. If they don’t want to be alone or just don’t want to let you go, they can come to the birthday party.”

“One of them is leaving via the plane you’re arranging,” Harry said. “So hopefully I won’t have anyone to think about.”

The beige room they ended up in had three more pieces of furniture than his motel room, two of which were a bouquet of plastic flowers stood on an armoire. Cured from the heartburn, he fell onto the bed, eyes raking the blank ceiling. Nick leaned on the armoire, arms crossed, gaze set on the ocean past the grandmother-pink curtains.

An indefinite amount of time passed like that. Harry tried keeping track of time by counting how often Nick’s gaze would slip from the waves and onto the bed. It turned out to be a tedious task.

Nick didn’t move closer, but asked, “Do they matter to you?”

“What do you mean? In which sense?”

“Any sense. Have you made plans with them? Was coming here some sort of three-way deal?”

“God,” Harry said and covered his face with his hands. “It was such a dumb thing. I think I was high, but either way we met up with this girl in one of the casinos – she and Lionel might’ve shagged. Probably. Must’ve. She was a pilot without a last-days schedule. And one of us must have asked where she had flown, if she had a favourite destination, and she said she could show us – show Lionel.”

It was easier to behind his palms, but Harry forced himself to look at Nick and found him looking back, unassuming.

“We came here, obviously. We didn’t have any plans, either, so she brought us over here for a good time. And we did. We had a good time. Found a flat to live in, which was admittedly cramped, but Sylvester and I both often spent evenings and mornings out in bars, and when we were home, Amelia was usually running errands or something. I didn’t see Lionel a whole lot. So, we drink, we play poker, we start reminiscing, but it doesn’t go far, because Lionel realises that he won’t be able to go home to his family. We’re stuck on the island. And he just loses it.”

Harry wiggled the gun from his trousers and scooted up on his elbows, tucking it into the nightstand drawer. He sighed and his chest felt lighter. He wished Nick would sit down with him, now. It would be all right.

“He gave me this tattoo,” Harry said and twisted onto his side, stringing back the scoop of his tee with a single finger.

“Bet your comeback was downright mean,” Nick said, arms now unsure in their crossed state. He sat down on the bed, over by Harry’s front. His fingers twirled at the tufts of denim at the holes by his knees. “But that girl isn’t coming along to the birthday party? They’re not going steady anymore?”

“She’s not,” Harry said. “She’s not coming. So, I don’t have a plan for being here – not anymore. Whichever plans I had got screwed over when I met you.”

“I’m honoured. If they don’t have anything to do tomorrow, you should invite them over. We have alcohol and a pool table. Does it get any better?”

Harry could hear the ocean. It was a whisper, but when Nick didn’t say anything the waves rolled across the ceiling and up Harry’s flank. They nested in his ears.

“Maybe you should go back downstairs,” he said. “They’re waiting for you. Might’ve finished off that drink already.”

“Do you want me to?”

Harry kept quiet. One of his hands eased across the plastic duvet, the back of it resting against Nick’s thigh. Tufts of denim were offered up to him and his fingers idled them. The ocean sang to them.

He wondered if he should tell Nick about the deal Sylvester and he had made, after Amelia had been murdered. Maybe about why there was a gun in the drawer next to them. But Nick couldn’t stay there tonight, so disclosing that, if Lionel’s warning bells started ringing anew, Harry would have to be the one to pull the trigger on him, would only keep him in the bed.

“The gun isn’t meant for you, or anyone,” he said instead, when Nick got up to leave, searing a mark of warmth into the duvet. “It’s mine for safe-keeping.”

“We can talk about it in the morning,” Nick said. “We’ve got time.”

They didn’t, but Harry let him go. For minutes, he listened to the ocean song, and eventually the feet padding up the hall outside his door. He dreamt about his sister.


	7. The flight

**16 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 5th, the flight**

“You have an honest to God cock in your neck. Looks seriously inflamed. I’ll fetch some bucket ice.”

“It’s no big deal, it’s probably just hot from the sun. It’s not like I’m going to live with it for long.”

Alexa didn’t sway. One fist of bucket ice already rested against her temple to soothe a hangover. Her grip readjusted, as if contemplating whether or not to give it to him. Her other hand poised a cigarette.

“Keep it,” Harry said, palm up in declination. More flies had swarmed around the banana peels on his plate during their chat. Now he swatted them off best he could, allowing his eyes to stray across the courtyard.

After little of a debate, Alexa lifted out a chair and sat down opposite him, its metal legs making a fuss on the stone when she scooted close enough to rest an elbow on the table top.

“You’re not feeling the slightest pounding?”

“Sweated out all of mine during the night,” Harry said. Partly, he had.

“Lucky bastard, then. George is still in bed. The plane isn’t coming over until the afternoon, anyway, and if anyone is to wake him up even for that, it’s Nick’s job. I’m trying to stay on everyone’s good sides.”

Harry’s gaze flicked across the courtyard anew.

“Isn’t it already afternoon?” he asked. Then, “Hang on – is the plane coming today? Is everyone coming here today?”

“Should be,” Alexa said. Melted ice trickled down her arm and teased at Harry’s brunch, from which he withdrew with a dissatisfied noise, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she scrunched it further, dragged it across her cheek. “Means I’ll get some help cleaning, which is— Of all the tasks in that calendar, I found cleaning the most appropriate, you know, to start with? Got to have music playing and rooms to check out and beaches to stroll during breaks. Try out whichever stuff the guys brought back. George was very adamant about not cleaning.”

“I can’t really get it through my head that Pixie…”

“Is preggers? Has a bun in the oven?”

“They’re all coming here. I’m going to see them again.”

He forked a banana peel and escorted it out of the pool of melted ice on the edge of his plate. Her nose wrinkled and she took another drag of the cigarette before putting it out on the white of the peel. Harry made a gesture that he hoped said _Oh yeah, no, I had finished anyway_ , and slouched in his chair.

“Is it strange to be back with us, for you?” Alexa asked. “After what happened with Nick—”

“Guess I won’t be able to properly answer that until I meet the rest. So far, I’m doing all right. I just didn’t think I would get to talk to any of you again. What time are you picking them up?”

“Nick’s got all of that in his head. Maybe at seven-ish? Hey, there he is.” And she raised a hand at Nick who trekked across the courtyard, phone at his ear and eyes distant.

He came to a halt at their table, close enough that sweat glimmered at his lip even under the sunshade.

“Let me borrow your phone,” he said to her.

She passed it over. “When do they land today?”

“That’s my point,” Nick said. “I don’t have reception. I’m on minus three bars here.”

“And you’ve checked outside of the resort as well?”

“Nothing works. Nothing comes through. I can’t—” He interrupted himself to shift back to his phone and frantically sweep across the screen. His fingers clamped down on it. The screen shivered in colours under the pressure before he put it down and launched his hands into his hair. “ _Dammit!_ ”

“What do you want?” Alexa asked.

Nick cursed. “Reception. I can’t get online. I can’t see anything.”

“Well, George spoke to Pixie yesterday morning and by then everything was still on track.”

“It’s not about the flight.”

Harry sensed a _fucking_ concealed in that sentence. Now that Nick was here in front of him, he didn’t seem able to look at him. Instead, he resorted to solemnly fiddling with the cigarette butt on his plate, nudging the splayed ashes into nonsensical doodles.

Alexa, however, had not picked up on his tone, and said, “Nick, some things just won’t work out, even now. It’s not the end of the world”, maybe because she was hungover, maybe because she believed it.

Nick exploded.

Harry stopped fiddling. During Nick’s tirade, he left the table. He came into the dining hall, surveying the crash site of mismatched porcelain bowls and plates and tumblers with the hotel’s logo in faded spirit.

When he turned around, Nick propped himself up against one of the pillars of the lobby, arms crossed, the stroke across his face of eye and eyebrow straining for normalcy in a way that would have been comical if Harry hadn’t just heard glass smashing on rocks.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said. He was still gathering his breath, pushing under doubt to make it a statement rather than an inquiry.

Harry didn’t know what to say. He had plans to finalise back at the motel, and a future to schedule. So, when Alexa joined them, stiller than Nick’s faux composition, Harry slipped past them without much of a thought.

***

It wasn’t until Harry had stayed a night at the Mandala Wellness Resort that he came to terms with the smell of the motel.

He always felt damp in the motel bed, as if he and five others had poured buckets of body fluids into the sheets and wrapped them around the sun to dry. It didn’t pair well with his recurring nightmares, nor with the shoulder-wrecking gasps that came afterwards when he sat up, forcing the tremors through his body as to not yield a single noise that might wake the others up. Then he would keep his fists in those sheets, which rippled as if they had a pulse, as if the decomposition of their skin was something real.

The thought crossed his mind as he entered the hole-in-the-wall, barely lit by anything now that they had strung up their used clothing over the gaping windows to block out heat and disparate weather conditions.

But when he entered, large parts of his bedframe had clawed its way to freedom as half of the mattress had sought out the floor, sheets and blanket stripped from its body. Now, only a concave pillow adorned the corpse. A trail of textiles led up to Lionel, slumped against an undistinguishable pile, and Sylvester, unconscious at his feet with particular limbs splayed in unnatural directions.

Harry became awash with tremors, a far more daunting experience in (albeit harshly filtered) daylight. It took force to reach for the gun tucked against his sweating flesh. Even then, the sight held him back. Lionel had a daze about him, as if he either didn’t see Harry or didn’t find him existing.

He could have obtained another gun during the night they’d spent apart. He could be caressing the trigger, metal to his back much like Harry now poised his firearm, waiting for a motion to break the mirage. He might have lured people back from the gambler’s den in town and now they occupied the reception, cracking open the vending machine that only stored knock-off Coca Cola and flicking the caps at the Jeep outside.

If Harry stopped to listen, he could almost hear small metal bouncing against hard metal, the single breath of dust swirling into the air as the caps hit the ground.

Then Sylvester moved. Or rather, Lionel rolled him onto his side and Sylvester gurgled, reached out a hand to pat at Lionel’s thigh. It was very much a sound instigated by Sylvester, which meant that his vocal chords still functioned. Which meant that he was at least semi-conscious – and what mattered, he was alive.

Harry’s grip around the handle eased. The tremors sustained. He wondered if he might ever heat up again.

“What?” he said. It came out as a drawn-out sigh.

“What?” Lionel answered.

Sylvester chimed in, inaudibly.

The belly of Harry’s mattress swelled, much like an overcooked potato would, in the wake of mattress straps to keep it in check. He found the strap being tied around Lionel’s upper arm.

“Now that you’re here,” Lionel said, teeth uncoupling from the peeling strap. He slapped his arm, then jerked the strap. Skin and muscle bulged below, threatening to bust the elastic. One of his feet came down on the tail of the mattress strap – determined. “Bon voyage.”

A needle glimmered in the dark before diving into Lionel’s arm with disconcerting precision.

“It’s not even clean,” Lionel said. Untying the strap and tossing the needle, he sagged against the amorphous pile. “But what’s the point, you know? And I rather trust Sylvester here. If something happens to me, I know who to go after for payback.”

Sober, the sound he emitted would have been a laughter. Now it died as a chuckle and a reciprocated pat on Sylvester’s shoulder.

Harry’s knees gave way, lowering him onto the runaway mattress.

“Jesus,” he said in an exhale. He found himself unable to let go of the gun or withdraw it, unable to do little but watch the scene.

“Hey, Harry,” said Sylvester. “Are you there?”

Harry couldn’t see anything but the soles of his feet and the back of his head.

“So, where’ve you been?” Lionel asked, voice tingling with pleasure that only brought Harry unease.

“This is what you did when you ran out on me yesterday.”

“Did… Did I _run?_ Maybe I did. Oh, that would explain why my shoes no longer have solid soles. Now I’ll be able to fly right ahead.”

“I’m just…”

Lionel hawked and emptied on the floor.

“I just came here,” Harry continued, “To say that the plane is coming over later today. I don’t know when it will be ready to take off, but I’ll make sure it’s soon.”

“Maybe I’ll stay here with you two.”

“I’m not staying,” Harry said, but this time it fell on deaf ears.

After losing an indefinite amount of time on the bed, he got up and lifted Sylvester onto the carpet, still on his side and now supported by pieces from the amorphous pile of junk Lionel lay on. He let Lionel stay where he was.

With one glance at the needle in Lionel’s slack hand, Harry crawled through the broken wall between their rooms and let the curtain shiver in his wake.

Lionel’s room had a broader and tidier bed. Its frame was only halfway rusted and squeaked regularly when being put under certain types of pressure, so once you had gotten used to the spots, it didn’t offer any particular surprises. Its odour, Harry realised as he sat down, was non-existent. That’s when it occurred to him that these textiles, although old, had been cared for, had been carefully rented to hygienic occupants, perhaps to the motel manager himself during periods of widespread vacancy.

Harry lay down and put the gun on the nightstand beside him, making sure it was empty. The bed wasn’t anything special, nothing he’d have bragged about at home. But here, having barely slept for weeks, he couldn’t wait to burrow down.

The void of smell conjured memories of the bed he’s slept in at the resort. If he took it a step further, he could imagine Nick deciding to stay, that Harry had allowed him to, and that Nick sat down on the bed beside him.

Harry wiggled his shoes off. He didn’t bother checking the state of the sheets when he burrowed; he had his eyes closed.

They didn’t talk much, that night, but sitting next to him and listening to his pointless talk, Nick might lay a hand on his shoulder, his hip, for comfort, to compensate the distance that had grown between them. And he might lie down, and they might cocoon themselves in each other’s arms. It was a kind of warmth Harry hadn’t felt in years.

To fuel the thought, Harry’s arm tunnelled under the covers to his side, fingers nestling at his hip, then farther.

Nick had started working out. Harry had seen it in images posted by the rest of the gang before he had unfollowed them and shut everything out. But seeing the change in real life had truly been something else – feeling it along his spine as the ocean whipped the shores outside.

Harry bundled the covers up behind him so only a thin sheet covered his front.

While the two-man party carried on downstairs with whichever drink George could whip up next, Harry came to the realisation that it didn’t matter, anything of the past, that he was worth this. He deserved love and Nick pumped that notion into him until he couldn’t see

anything beyond it. It became all that existed – affection, Nick, their bed and the waves crashing onto shore.

Harry swallowed a noise and flung his eyes across the motel ceiling. It was mostly void of the peels and cracks that consumed Sylvester’s and his in the adjacent room. He hung in the high for as long as possible, but the more he thought about staying in that scenario, the faster it slipped away, the faster his regular veil of distaste and isolation diluted the good in him.

He turned his face to the pillow, to the slip of duvet at his shoulder. Nick was still there. Or, he could have been. In Harry’s head, he was, for a little while longer, before he couldn’t keep the imagery up and the pillow was once more clean, threadbare fabric.

***

They took the night off from poker. It might have served its purpose, had it been a night of certain goodbyes, but Lionel no longer appeared in a rush to leave, and Harry didn’t feel like bringing up the matter of the fuel and shape of the plane or the pilot’s wellbeing.

It became a soft evening, which transitioned into a mellow night with sharp edges. Harry listened for tyres in front of the motel.

When a band of cyclists tried the vending machine outside the reception during one of their stops, and the flashlights on their helmets or handlebars flicked across the clothes hung in the motel room, or a car took a wrong turn and stopped to relocate with the headlights burning through someone’s patched-up Levi’s, or the moonlight slanted into the glass at Sylvester’s mouth and high-jacked the bubbles foaming at the broken skin over his lips, Harry’s leg would stop jumping. It was never long enough to make the others pick up on what was off about him. It was never long enough that he himself could register it.

There was a TV in the room, had been all along from what he had been told, but it didn’t work. If one poised it so one corner stood on a thin book or piece chipped off the baseboards, it might purr for a second before buzzing out. However, the radio still worked.

Sylvester sprawled in front of it with a pillow under his ribs, head propped and eyes pleasantly lidded. It seemed impossible for Harry to look away from him, especially as Lionel got up to drink in the open corridor, by the railing, every now and then.

The sight reminded Harry of a child tuning in to hear of heavy snowfall approaching in the dawn of Christmas, much like he had been told his mother’s and father’s generation did. He had never experienced it first-hand, but Gemma had, during the early years.

It had been when he wasn’t yet able to take his first steps, being clutched to his mother’s chest when they watched the telly. Their mother had watched a lot of TV during that time. She had said it was because of the back pains she would get, feeding him by the kitchen sink, or walking up with him to the nursery. Gemma had said it was because their father had taken all of her energy with him when he left.

But Gemma had refused the telly and inherited their grandparents’ radio, a sturdy piece of work. It towered over her and featured an impossible amount of wheels and buttons and screens, but she mostly sat on a pillow in front of it – even years later when the radio had broken – and listened to the local news.

One morning at the beginning of a new term, Harry had come in to sit with her as she were to escort him to school with their mother working early shifts. That time she had told him about the radio’s origin and let him fiddle with the broken wheels and buttons.

None of the inhabitants of the motel room moved much that evening, so it was easy for Harry to drift off. For a moment, it felt as if he hadn’t gone anywhere at all, and this might still be his sister’s bedroom. But only for a moment, before Lionel came back in, smelling of smoke and the beach.

“When did you say the plane was leaving?” Lionel said.

Harry’s voice was slow, as he shifted between memory and reality, when he said, “I don’t reckon I did.”

“When might you _imagine_ it leaving?”

Harry startled at his tone. He looked to Sylvester, who also lost focus from his daydreaming and tried covering it up as if he’d just bobbed his head to fight sleep.

“I can’t answer that,” Harry said. “I can ask.”

He could, but it wasn’t something he felt up to tonight. Some small part of him hoped Lionel would let it go. For now, anyway. Harry knew he didn’t have forever to stall, but he didn’t need forever.

Lionel wouldn’t have it.

“Yeah, you can ask right now. Here, borrow this.” And one of his hands shot forward with a phone, fingers cramped around it. “No, wait. Duh. There’s no signal. Then I won’t be needing this, I suppose.”

Unceremoniously, he stepped out by the railing and let his phone drop. It must have crushed upon hitting the stone pathway, shrouded in sand, because when Lionel came back in, he had a glimpse in his eyes that told everyone they shouldn’t bother, that he was right either way, and a slight smile played on his face.

“Back in the day, people always talked about living off the grid. They even came up with ways to do it in the cities when they didn’t have the time to pack up and move away. Just drop your phone.”

He sat down on Harry’s sad mattress, but not before jerking it back onto the rusted bedframe. It creaked in resistance.

“Take my bed tonight,” he told Harry. “Seems you enjoyed it far more than I’ve done. I just haven’t had an—” His finger circled the air, as if spinning an imaginary basketball. “—urge to do that sort of thing now that the big crunch is happening.”

“Is that how you imagined it ending?” Sylvester said.

He sounded freshly upset, upset in the way one might be upon receiving bad news upon already low expectations. The radio still spoke to them, but he didn’t even twitch when they made a joke and a burst of laughter made their voices crackle around the edges, unlike his small appreciative nods and blinks prior.

“Any better suggestions and I’ll take them,” Lionel answered. “I’ve had a billion theories.”

“Perks of being a hitman, of being in touch with death, day and night and in between,” Sylvester said.

Harry couldn’t tell if it was meant as a joke.

“Side effects of being one,” Lionel said and the conversation died shortly afterwards.

Harry stayed with his thoughts a bit longer. No one turned off the radio, but the disinterest in the broadcast became palpable. Once or twice, a tune would come along that made each of them snap from passivity and discuss a memory, akin to how things had been in Vegas. During the broad pauses, they would hear a faraway storm brewing, then pattering on the terracotta roof and nestling into the denim of jeans hung before the gaping windows. During one of these pauses, Harry headed through the hole in the wall.

The door in Lionel’s part of the two-room-situation had been boarded up when they first arrived. However, the only window frame still complete with panes was there, one with small latches to keep it from busting open at the wind.

Lying sleepless in bed, Harry recovered one of many toothpaste tubes they passed around and, sans a toothbrush, squished some on his finger and smeared it across his teeth. He imagined someone might have boarded themselves up in the room, maybe scared of a flu outbreak – something Amelia had mentioned during one of their long sun-filled afternoons in the flat – and had maybe recognised somewhere in the delirium that the only way out was through the wall.

He found himself looking for bits of a drill or hammer by the veiled opening. If someone had boarded themselves up in here, which would explain the hole, they must have planned a B-route, taken precautions in case of emergency within the four walls. And if a car passed by outside, he might pause his search and wait for an outcome, a pebble to the remaining windowpane or steps up the rain-slicked stairs with a hand gliding along the railing.

Between then and the next time he realised he was still awake, he must have slept, because added weight punctuated the mattress and pressured his chest.

“On the twelfth of August,” Lionel said, “My family is heading up to the mountains, off the fucking grid as far as _off_ is concerned. We have a conglomerate of cabins up there, us and the Hendersons, and they plan on spending the end of days up there, close to the sun.”

The familiar sensation of a gun, a lesser weight Harry hadn’t noticed for the person sitting on him, dipped into his mouth. He felt his tongue dry and the stale air sweep his throat with ticks of metal.

The gun shifted absentmindedly, deeper and askew, and it felt like a wickedly bad visit to the dentist. Involuntarily, Harry’s mouth contracted around it and its edges scuffed the inside of his cheeks, scraping off slivers of skin. In the dark, he could only guess Lionel’s silhouette, his gaze not trained on Harry, but on something in the wall.

“What I’m saying by this, is that it would be nice to be back by then. We will need to purchase goggles and shit, because I think the ones I used as a kid have expired. It’ll be bright up there. My brother on the other hand, he could have had a promising career in the field. And my parents as well. Lunatics. But I won’t be living the ski-life up there. I’ll be in charge of the lifts, eating dinner at the Lodge, wasting away in front of a fire miles away from you. I would like that.”

When the gun eased from his mouth, Harry didn’t dare to breathe, afraid he might cough or have to reply. But as the gun eased away, so did Lionel and the weight on Harry’s chest, until the drapery between the rooms gave off a soft sound and he was alone again.


	8. Midnight sun

**13 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 8th, midnight sun**

A good blackout, someone had once told Harry, was supposed to do three things: bring you home to bed, tuck you in, and make sure you forgot about both. Like a babysitter with highly questionable techniques, but a questionably high success rate.

On the contrary, bad blackouts put all their focus on the third act. They left bruises, a rotten taste on your tongue, limbs sleeping in odd bends, permanent crooks in your neck. So, the first thing that occurred to Harry was that he couldn’t move his left arm. He also didn’t know where he was.

The spectrum of blackouts passed by his inner eye, and it became easier to focus on as the world outside of him dulled. Pain was ruthlessly consistent, even when nothing else was. He let it be an anchor.

There was no way for him to know that he’d lost two days. Forty-eight hours, swallowed by the nothingness that would soon ingest all of them, and all Harry could think about was how cold his toes were, how the person who’d taught him about the blackout spectrum had also provided him with a bed and food en route to Las Vegas, how this room he was in had a ceiling fan which chains didn’t knock together in the whirr of rotors.

A voice broke through to him. “Should I keep on? I don’t know if it helps. I’d find it painful, honestly, but… maybe it’s not that type of damage, on the other hand. This doesn’t seem to be doing much for him. It’s funnier to… just…”

Something tickled at Harry’s lip, below his nose. His body heaved a dry sneeze.

“Hah! That’s new.”

Another voice cut in, “Bag of _shit_.”

“Do tell, did you start the party early?”

“Shitbag and the rest of us haven’t quit partying together since we first met. I think he’d love to tell you that story, but I wouldn’t suggest bringing it up while he’s still got—”

“Oh yeah! God, didn’t see that before. Poor boy. I should…”

A cloth dabbed at his mouth, dabbed at his neck, dabbed at his collar. So, he was still wearing clothes. Things could be worse, possibly. But things could be a lot better.

The corner of his mouth jerked, and his hand followed shortly after. Eyes were harder to crack open. It felt as if he rolled the lids up with a lever. _Time to rise and shine! It’s a brand-new day! Just gotta get those blinds away._

When he got them open, plastic feathers coated most of his chest, assorted in no particular colour scheme. They appeared frothing from his mouth, and if he hadn’t felt the teasing cold at his toes, he would have believed that to be the case. Through a patch of air in the plumage, he saw his feet. Naked. He wasn’t delirious. People were in the room, or one person, or two, one of whom stood by a window, back to him, and one of whom tugged the heap of feathers from him.

“Go ahead, now that he’s awake,” Sylvester suggested, more withdrawn than before.

“If you’re feeling up to it, could you give me a nod to make sure you’re, well, awake?”

Harry tipped his chin up, hoping it’d be enough. His body didn’t feel like his own. He was only safe in his thoughts. Something cracked in his neck, drew a sigh from him.

The feathers slithered off. Harry watched them coil around Pixie’s neck. He blinked. She was still there, still feathery, still watching him, intermittently caressing her boa.

Even though he didn’t want to, he felt the shift of temperature in the room as he scanned it, scanned them.

“Oh shit,” he said, half surprised to have a voice, half surprised at his realisation. “Did I miss it?”

“The end of the world?” Sylvester said and turned around. “No, man, you’re just in time. Matilda hits in five, four, three, two – there! That’s it. No more world to grieve! No more shots to down!”

Harry couldn’t be bothered with his tone. “I missed the flight. Right?” He looked to Pixie. Her lips moved in small motions, so he cut in before she could muster her answer. “It can’t be gone. Not again. I was supposed to go back. I don’t know what… I know someone who was supposed to be on that plane. How many flew back?”

“ _The_ plane?” Pixie asked, then shot a glance to Sylvester and received a nod. “Harry, it’s still here. You haven’t missed… Well, you missed quite a lot, actually. George and Alexa and Nick had prepared a welcome dinner for us, said you were coming and some mates of yours as well. But none of you showed up. So, we’ve all been recalculating a bit – drove Nick up the walls, at first, but I think he’s embracing it, now – just to make sure the dinner isn’t lost.

“We ate some of it, of course. Mostly the seafood. I mean, I wasn’t going to starve me and this little fellow.” She patted her belly, and Harry’s eyes glazed over. “A lot was salvageable though, once we’d gotten through the crabs and clams, and Ian, Aimee and Emily are out shopping now. If any of you come up with anything you’d like to have at dinner tonight, just say and I’ll contact them. Somehow.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Reception is gone.”

Pixie smiled at him, a mother’s smile, the one that without anyone’s knowledge stripped you naked and bared your bones, made you certain you would be in good hands.

“What did you do?” Sylvester asked him.

Harry found himself at a poker table. No, not _at_ it, but next to it, behind the infallible backs of gamblers gathered around, where an aroma of tightly rolled cigars, the crumbles of which soiled already scarred ashtrays, mixed with the tasteless shrouding them all. But the game of poker wasn’t the main attraction, he realised. It had been loosely swept aside, cards still unturned with one or two players toying with their own hand, psyching each other out. All looked to Harry, then, and he found a new grip around the gun in his hand, pushing the barrel up his mouth, regarding their faces where an immense concoct of emotions resided, knowing as well as him that there was a fifty percent’s chance.

“What did you do?” Sylvester asked again. He’d moved behind Pixie, not sitting down, no longer pacing.

“My feet are cold,” Harry said, just as Pixie tucked them under the blanket. The blackout was dispatching itself.

“Maybe you should keep talking,” Sylvester said to Pixie.

She hesitated.

“If you want to,” Harry said.

“Did you want to fly back before the party?” she asked.

Harry dug his toes into the mattress. He found it wholesome, more like the Mandala’s bedding than the motel’s. “Yeah.”

“Do you still want to?”

“I want to go to dinner,” Sylvester said, eyes on Harry. “I’m no culinary mastermind. Eating free food, probably of some quality as well? What can I say – sounds like paradise.”

“We’d all like it if you could come,” Pixie added. “I, especially. And if you went back, it would mean that there’s no way for us home. There’s only one plane.”

“Shit,” Harry said and his chest deflated. He felt bloated.

“What are you going to do?”

“There’s no big plan. I just want to see mum. I figured, there has to be some possibility of getting there from the US. From there, if anywhere. It’s not much of a shot – I can’t really call to check in on her, now, so it’s a chance I have to take. I can’t stay here.”

“Oh, all right. But there’s still some of us going back after the birthday party. Directly to England. Makes your one shot more likely – hailing a cab, or renting a bloody car—” She chuckled through the swearword. “—must be easier than hailing a flight?”

“Haven’t gone so well in the past,” Harry agreed. “You’ve got a point. If you want… If I fit on the flight?”

“So, get up,” Sylvester said.

“I don’t think I—”

“Look, Pixie and company and myself have been hawking you for a day straight now, so you should be stronger than you think. Before that, though? No idea what you were up to.”

“Yeah,” Harry said, screwing his fists into the sheets and hoisting himself up, legs over the edge and his left arm starting to wake. He remained, wondering if his limbs sported a delayed reaction. “Me neither,” he said.

Sylvester and Pixie made way for the door when he started unwrapping the cocoon of blankets around his, apparently, naked body.

“Last time he was like this,” he overheard Sylvester say, as if it was no more than an appetizing anecdote, “I just bought him kale and juice. Was that standard when you knew him?”

And Pixie saying, “So it hasn’t escalated?”

Harry hung on the knew while they conversed, away from him.

***

Around noon, Sylvester came back in, reeking of hand-sanitiser, and placing a tray by the bedside. It was full of pots too small to stash anything, patterned with zig-zags or dotted or striped diagonally in colours that would have made Harry’s head pound if Sylvester hadn’t dusted his hands off on the apron he sported, just for show, and handed over a fortune cookie. Harry’s nose and forehead expanded in the golden wrapping, obscuring his already bag-ridden eyes.

“Found a new place, down the street,” Sylvester said and folded his arms up. Flour – Harry hoped it was flour – dappled his hands. “Honestly, I think it’s the same place we went to, but they’ve changed locale. Last place must’ve been scooped out.”

“You know how to make a bloke happy,” Harry said, peeling the cookie.

“Aren’t you going to read the fortune? It’s half the pleasure.”

Harry let it lie next to him while the crust dissolved in his mouth. At least he was sitting upright, now. “I think

Sylvester looked as if he wanted to sit down, only resisting the impulse by tightening his arms around his frame. “Yeah. Maybe it’s better to make our own fortunes.”

“I need to make sure the flight is still on. Pixie said there’s only one plane, but Nick said… He said he’d arrange for things to run smoothly. There must be two planes coming over.”

Sylvester nodded. “Pixie left, now that you’re awake. We’re on for dinner, though?”

“Are you upset with me?”

“Not nearly as much as I was. I know neither of us were planned, for you, but I want us to stick it out now where we are. I’m glad I know you, Harry, but stop running off without telling me shit. I don’t want you to die.”

 _Hen_ , cusped Harry’s lips, but he burrowed it in a smear of sweet and sour on the cornbread from the tray. “Mate,” he said, once Sylvester’s arms began slacking, “Then I’ve got some tough news for you.”

“ _Before_. You know that’s what I mean. I think you deserve to live.”

Among the cornbread and allotted sauces, chops of lime and wet wipes hid. The food grinded towards Harry’s stomach and inside of it. He put aside the half-eaten bread and got to his feet, placed a hand on Sylvester’s shoulder, knowing it wasn’t enough.

“I’m going over to the resort. Tell you what – I’ll talk to Nick about the plane and check if they have any awfully expensive champagne to waste on us tonight. Most of them I know, and they’re good people, so you’ll be in good hands when I…”

Sylvester nodded, reciprocated the shoulder clasp, as if they’d made an oath.

***

After bouncing between newly arrived guests in inquiry and gawky hugs and handshakes, Harry found Nick on the marble staircase of the left wing, opposite of the hotel rooms and towards the more leisurely designed area. At first glance, he appeared to be seated with the calendar-plus-journal in his lap, pages dusted in reflected sunshine and knees drawn to his chest to make a quiet sphere for himself.

He looked up when approached, and though he smiled as if in surprised greeting, Harry suspected he’d been regarded earlier while contemplating.

“This is my downtime,” Nick said, and now Harry saw the molten prints of plants on the time-worn pages. Some had recently been filled in with pencil, others left for dead by accidental water dapples and ruthless heat. “They told me to _‘fucking chill’_ , but I kept walking around the resort to find things to do, thinking about things I was _supposed_ to do. And I realised the only way to stop thinking was to come see you. Alexa thought there’d be too many cooks working at once, though, that we’d spoil the broth. Yet I don’t see how more eyes could have spoiled anything.”

“No, good call, actually. It was good to have few people around. Got me some time to wake up.” He didn’t want to sit down. All marble was occupied with Nick’s presence, and Harry wasn’t sure if he’d been invited. “What’s with the plants?”

“Downtime,” Nick said, still smiling. “Aimee’s idea of a ‘fun _and_ relaxing’ time. Marriage changes people. Please, sit down.”

It was what Harry had waited for, so he did, but at the same time the formality of the situation set off a round of slumbering ache in him.

“I feel much better now that you’re here,” Nick said, but Harry couldn’t tell if it was part of the wall of politeness between them or an attempt to mount it. “I find it much easier to be alone when I’m with someone. How is the cock in your neck healing?”

The skin there sizzled for a moment out of sheer attention. “Haven’t done a good job of keeping it out of the sun.”

“It’s bruised,” Nick said, pages of the journal falling together when he tilted his head for a better view. “Not the actual tattoo,” he added, “But the skin around it. Most of your neck is.”

“Must’ve happened in my sleep. Have a lot of unknown bruises these days. Speaking of which, there’s one thing I’m concerned about. This friend of mine, he really needs to get back before the party.”

“Right,” Nick said, now with his hands clasped. His up-tilted chin shielded his mouth.

“But then there are the rest of us who are going back – we’re going to need two planes. Or at least two flights.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m counting on. One before, for your friend. One after for the rest. Was that why you came here?”

Harry couldn’t look at him anymore, so he swayed his gaze to the greenhouse around which hotel corridors branched, with cleaning carts left for dead in their gullets, where some doors remained ajar. Perhaps they were only stopped by a stray limb in their maws – a foot in the door, wasn’t that how the saying went?

Nick placed a hand on his knee. His fingers were coloured in pencil peels, which came off on Harry’s skin upon touch. It was necessary scrape that conjured, “Mostly,” from Harry’s glued throat. “I heard you made dinner. I hope everyone is settling in all right.”

“Don’t worry about that. I can’t worry about that now, anyway, and if I can’t worry, there’s nothing we can do about the situation.”

“We could go for a walk,” Harry said with a nod for the greenhouse.

Nick closed the book and took him by the hand. Before they could venture off, Harry said, “There’s a favour I need to ask of you. I know we have… stuff to work through, but it shouldn’t matter since the resort is massive. So, I was thinking, would you happen to have some spare rooms? Me and someone, we need a few nights away from the motel. And if we’ll be in the way, you could just put us in the opposite direction of whichever rooms you’re occupying.”

“Or you could hog the main suite with me,” Nick said, then glanced over to see how the proposal had been received. Harry couldn’t read him, couldn’t read himself. “I’m over the past. New times, new possibilities. So, main suite or…” They stopped in front of an open door, beyond which a room contained layers and layers of drapes and mutilated carpeting – _Don’t have many guests over?_ “Are you staying for tonight?”

“Sylvester and I are coming for dinner. And if your offer still stands…”

“Oh, of course, I shouldn’t force you to decide _now_. You haven’t seen the main suite yet, haven’t had the chance to take in its atmosphere properly! Do you feel complete with the view of this wing, ready to move on?”

This time, Harry was the one grabbing him, and they took off in the general direction of the room he had slept in.

It turned out that the grand suite was only up the hallway of that corridor, meandering up an indoor fire escape which had a warning sign hanging off a chain in the wall, with the other chain meekly tapping against the concrete. The farther they snaked through the labyrinth, the more they had to depend on lamps in the ceiling. What once were chandeliers in the lobby turned into plate-like fixtures bursting of suns turned into fluorescent tubes like arrows spiralling straight ahead turned into bulbs behind prints on glass where the carpet gave way to solid wood.

“Doesn’t it get hot here? I figured, with the narrow space,” Harry said.

Nick rapped his knuckles against the concrete walls. Then they were past the cleaner’s closets and storages and out in a broader corridor, graced by windows. They stopped by a single door, not the double-variant Harry had expected.

“Likely, there is an easier way around here,” Nick said, “But I haven’t found it. Don’t have the time to look, really. Do you want to talk about the gun you carry around?”

It came unannounced. Nick pushed the door open, unlocked, without any petals on the bedspread or iced champagne in the bucket by the bed.

“Not really.” Harry stepped around him. Glass overtook most of the surfaces, whether in mirrors or windows or bits of the ceiling, a void only rooted by the room’s textiles.

“Can I want to talk about it?” Nick asked.

Harry shrugged, falling onto the bed. “I don’t carry it anymore, either way, so…”

While his last syllable hung in the air, Nick sat down next to him. Harry’s mind lurched with his smell – cologne, or just an effect of sleeping in this bed. Harry turned his face to the duvet, rich in perfume.

“Are you the one keeping maintenance here?” he asked in amusement.

“I’ll tell you a secret – I haven’t actually slept in here yet. Usually I fall asleep in chairs or other’s beds. Or on the floor. There’s a lot to do before the…” He whistled, circling a finger in the air.

Harry sat up. “Your work has really damaged you. Still waking up before five?”

“On most days. But you don’t keep yourself well, either. What happened the other night?”

“You are bothered by it.”

“It’s hard not to be. I’m trying to move ahead while you’re stuck in the past. I’ve never seen anyone as haunted as you, as you’ve been on the island. Not even when you left me – us. I know what happened with Gemma.”

Whichever warm feeling had let Harry stay at the resort, it now reflected against all the glass in the room, suffocating him. The hearty scent of belonging in the sheets unravelled into a sharp taste brimming his head.

“Gemma,” was all he could say.

“Drag yourself out of that hole.” Nick kneeled before him, took his stiff hands. “It wasn’t your fault. There was no way you could have known what was going to happen to her. Okay? You’ve made a lot of fucked up decisions during the time I’ve known you, but you couldn’t have known. Saving her might not have been an option.”

Harry prepared for his wobbly voice as he opened his mouth, braced himself for unsteady hands grasping on to Nick’s, but he was firm as he said, “She loved me.”

“It’s not hard to love you, whichever atrocities you think you’ve committed. Now is your chance to move on. Your guilt is destroying you.”

Harry knew he must have talked to Sylvester, but he was overwhelmed with the anger flourishing in his chest. It licked his wounds but tore apart his head, baring what his shame had tried to hide for the past few months. All of his dreams came together at once, and for the first time since he started dreaming of her, it seemed as if he had a realistic depiction of her.

The daze lifted. In its wake remained a peace Harry hadn’t felt in his sobriety since he left home. Nick came into focus again. Despite his gaze locked to Harry’s, he didn’t appear to have registered what impact he’d had. His hands still travelled in small areas on Harry’s knobbed knees – Harry wondered if he was even aware of it.

He picked up one of Nick’s hands, and the other one immediately stilled as Nick’s gaze fell. “It’s quite easy to love you, as well.”

“You say so.” Nick’s voice was small, entranced by the shift in mood.

“I’m going to stick around the resort, if you’re looking to be alone with someone again.”

Nick stood so their faces levelled, slanted, his mouth shifting in silent speech. Then he straightened up. He said, “You can pick whichever room you want. I’ll show you where the others are sleeping.”


	9. If my friends should ask for me

**13 DAYS LEFT; AUGUST 8th, if my friends should ask for me**

From the balustrade perched high in the lobby, Harry watched the dinner unfold. Mountains of pots and pans and single unities coasted to and fro the kitchen, with a head glancing his way once in a while. Their smiles conjured a self-conscious wave from him, as he mouthed something they would perceive as _talk later_. If his message took more than two tries to come through, Nick was usually somewhere nearby to, Harry hoped, explain it to them.

The downstairs quarters boiled with flavour and smell. Each cook had something unique to bring to the table – whether it was a creamy pesto crowned with uncut basil, a steak black with spices from the grill station on the terrace, or mixed drinks.

Harry recognised a few of the men crowding by the spirits, experimenting and implementing a feminine touch in passing now and then. But before long, most of them had diverged for the grill or the plating (which turned out to be a much larger operation than anyone must have anticipated – Harry lost count of seats in the thirties) and the drinks had been aided by more women.

Out on the terrace, in the cloaks of the ruthless fire, Alexa and Pixie passed a cigarette between them, unaware of his gaze, seemingly unaware of everyone. It wasn’t until after a few minutes of regarding them that Harry noticed Sylvester sat on a stool on the terrace, nearby but far off enough to avoid the fumes. Still, he didn’t look rigid, just at peace with the sounds and smells he weltered in.

This was the piece that fused Harry’s worlds together.

Up on the balustrade, whether standing or with his legs dangled between the balusters, he fished out the fortune cookie Sylvester had given to him. Crumbs fell to his dress shoes upon cracking it open, eating it in small pieces while reading it. Briefly, he imagined Gemma there with him, how implausible of a reality that would be.

His rows of teeth grinded together unexpectedly and made his grip around the paper waver. He didn’t want to think about her anymore. Yet, as his eyes scavenged the dinner in its final moments of preparation, he thought that while he would see their mother again and hold her in his arms and they would see it through together, he would never die with Gemma.

He finished off the cookie with decisive chews, as if proving something to himself.

Bells tolled at his feet. Someone had brought out the reception bell and now clicked it methodically, surveying the rooms for stray guests. A handful of them came out from behind Harry and made their way down the staircase.

Harry couldn’t find time to look at each individual. Where discomfort would have rooted inside him, awe now bloomed. Of all of those attending, he was the one who’d had the party brought to him. It could have been held in London, or Oldham, or the fucking Bahamas, without him knowing, yet Nick had arranged for this so Harry could attend.

As he approached dinner in the hustle of people searching their seats, it flashed before him all the toes he’d stepped on and the hearts he had tried to mend, mangled by remembrance of joy and weeks spent off the grid with his soul strung to a handful of others, a wire of light in the night. He toyed with the fortune in the pocket of his trousers, popped another button on his shirt in an effort to convince himself that everything was all right. But he never felt his guard easing up. It didn’t help that Nick sat some seats up the table from him with his garish tourist jewellery and a glass in hand, his grin as broad as the Earth and his words thawing whichever unoiled cogs that were in presence.

By the end of his informal speech, after add-ons and comments from the attendants, a chorus of clinking cutlery conjured more branches of conversation. Harry got caught up in it.

He tried not to think about dinners like this over Christmas at Nick’s, or with the London crew on a day off, or the post-Brit noodle debacle for breakfast that had only caused further hangover – same atmosphere, the belief that he could turn anywhere and be met with warmth and with being wanted.

He tried to think about this moment, this dinner, linger on textures and jokes that passed him by and linger on Nick’s offhand glances to him and realise that he received such glances from people he once could have made blood oaths with. It was warmth. It was wanting, being wanted.

Sylvester took seat next to him when it emptied, leaning in.

“How many of them do you actually know?” he asked.

Harry kept his smile, but it was starting to hurt. He’d worked up a buzz. “A few.”

“Listen, I’ve worried about you. And I don’t think how much you know about it.”

 _Hen_ , Harry thought, and his cheeks strained.

“I’ve said it before – I know this isn’t what either of us had in mind, and… Apparently you’re going back home, somehow, but I still don’t know where that leaves me. With you and Lionel both gone, I started thinking—”

“You haven’t seen Lionel?” Harry said.

In the corner of his eye he caught an elegant stripe of red fabric as the former owner of the seat coasted by them. Whoever it was had been (still was? What did count at the end of the world?) a brand within stage work as well as within certain model agencies. He might have published a book – Harry knew there had been talk about a book earlier. All these people, somehow tying into Nick, to his friends.

Harry tried again, for his own benefit of wrapping his head around things. “Olsson, don’t you know where he is?”

“Do _you?_ Didn’t you go out and gamble together, finally get those nudes I’ve been asking about?” A sigh. “He goes off far more than you do – does it matter?”

“Not if he stays away.” Harry buried his head against his arms resting on the table top.

Ian leaned over with a brotherly back pat and a glance to Harry’s half-empty glass. He advised, “Try not to drink like it’s the end of the world. Maybe just the end of tonight?”

“Like there’s no tomorrow,” Harry said while the hand receded. “Sylvester, want to hear something fucked up?” He picked himself up. “The night of my leaving, when I took Lionel’s bed… He came in to mine. Made some really good arguments as to why we didn’t deserve to keep him here.”

“Fucking Christ—”

“But I can’t kill someone else. He’s got his gun back, so I’d barely have the means to, anyway.”

“Well, fuck. If he doesn’t come back, we don’t have a problem. No idea where he went?”

“There’s nothing, when I try thinking back.”

“You don’t remember being dredged from a ditch? For real? Was worried you’d swallowed boatloads of sand, but you proved us wrong straight away, didn’t you.”

Harry had felt gravel under his skin in in his teeth, but most of those worries had been expelled by a bright new day and breakfast in bed – a taste of oil replenished with incense-clogged tea. He shook his head.

“By the time I saw you,” Sylvester said, “They had already been there for at least ten minutes. I never asked why they were there, but it was on the way to town – or out of town, I guess – so I figured you and Lionel had gone off again.”

“It’s been a long time since we went off anywhere together.”

“Vegas,” Sylvester said, and Harry nodded. “Makes me think about something. I talked to Pixie about the resort, figured the motel had played out its role, with the dinner invitations and birthdays coming up, that you’d rather stay here than in a hole-in-the-wall and that I could spend time with folks without worrying about assassination. So, now we can. I’ve no doubt these rooms measure up to the motel’s, but… We’re not in Nevada anymore.”

Harry watched him tinkle with his nose ring, subtly hewing the sesame seed prawns on his plate with the other. Harry ought to do something decent for him, other than a thank you, for all the shit he had been put through. To do that, he needed to recover his vocabulary, which, he had recently come to terms with, presented another dimension of compassion when undamaged. It was harder to conjure these words when his mouth and throat had forgotten how to make up their sounds.

“Thank you,” he said. “Are you sure you have brought all the incense you need?”

Somewhere between now and the offer, Sylvester’s thoughts had parted with the present. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll take it as it comes.”

Harry gleaned at the fortune, stolen briefly from his pocket to furl in the chandelier igniting his palm. He was making amends with his past – wasn’t he? Nick had forgiven him. At the very least, he was striving to, and couldn’t that be enough for now? Going around the table to gauge the possible splinters he had put in people – it was egoistical. Who was he, to these people, anyway? Nothing compared to what he could be.

He let his taste buds ghost over a vast minority of the feast’s dishes while staying put, offering up the space for anyone to grab, listening in rather than participating, letting himself feel. He watched Sylvester nestle in with Pixie and Aimee, picking up the threads of conversation as plainly as one would take a sip of water.

“Harry.”

And there he was, hand folded over the backrest’s cheap carving, with wine-tinted cheeks and a vacancy in his eyes.

“Do you want to go outside?”

They ended up sitting on the terrace, which was a few feet too high up to toe into the sand. The box of abandoned Merlot on the deck lent Harry something to do while Nick smoked a joint, picking peels off the wooden railing where the chasms came in etchings. Contrary to the rest of the landscape, the Merlot tasted fresh. Harry nursed it, fallen into Nick’s side and watching the rising moon with a crook in his heart.

“Here’s the million-dollar question,” he said, after a while. “What are you thinking?”

“Sorry. Didn’t realise I wasn’t talking. Mouth yaps on and on for hours, creates the feeling without the motion.”

“Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Thought I heard someone say they were heading out for a surf.”

Nick shook his head, weaved the snatches of smoke around his finger. “In the morning, there might be some daredevils. I’d planned on doing it myself, before the reception went. Makes it so much harder to google the instructions.”

“Had it all planned out?”

“Wikipedia has a very elaborate techniques section.”

“There is actual equipment?”

“Over there somewhere…” Nick gestured towards the shrinking beach. “An entire shed crammed with wetsuits and boards and hedge cutters and keys.”

He put out the joint in an etching of a clover on the railing. From the lettering, numerous lines branched as if marking the very veins of the wood. Harry thumbed pearls of wine from the tap and pressed the pad of his finger into the carvings while it bled out. Nick took his hand, said, “Nothing is as it should be.”

Harry breathed in, equal parts ocean and Nick. “How do you mean?”

“I’ve promised too much. All these bucket lists will be the end of me; Collette wants to hike and sight landmarks – apparently, we have those, here! – but then Ian wants to take a day to see this winery or cave on the other side of the island, or Annie wants a night in of just pints and memories. I can’t provide them with all of this and simultaneously keep my head. And I’m just realising that we’ve all been growing in different directions, for so many years, and whereas our pasts stay interconnected, our futures might not. Now I don’t think I’ll be able to come through, because in my head we’ve all been the same.

“What use am I if I’ve torn them from their last plans?”

“They’re here because they want to spend some of it with you.”

“It’s because they think I’m still keeping my promises. But I can’t. Harry, I can’t… _do_ all of this.”

“Try doing what you want. Just for a while, just to feel like you’ve satisfied someone. It might give you clarity.”

Some wry comment lurked at Nick’s mouth, but he held it in, overlooking the vast darkness before them.

“It’s strange to think about what comes afterwards,” Harry said, instead. “After all the plans have been made and dealt with. And now it’s worse, knowing there is no future. Christ, I became a hitman to deal with it. It felt like a decent idea, at the time. And after you’d left Radio 1, did you have a vision about what would come next? The stages you’d build?”

“I didn’t _leave_. They fired me,” Nick said.

“How could they fire you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They mustn’t have wanted a thirty-five-plus meth-head/cocaine addict leading the nation’s early birds. Supposedly, that wasn’t appealing to the company, whether at or away from the mic.”

“But you— Just because of the rumours?”

“Learn when to let it go, Harry.” Nick removed the shoulder supporting Harry’s head, but kissed him in return. “This is what I would do, if I had the choice,” he said.

“You do,” Harry answered, on repeat in his head, occasionally aloud.

“It’s funny – first dinner you were supposed to attend, you couldn’t make it, and during the spare one you’re out here.”

“It seems like there’s enough love inside there to last a lifetime.”

“Like—” Nick picked up the Merlot, struggled with the tap. “If we go back in, the walls will cave. Overborne by love. Open up.”

Harry tipped back on the deck, the wood rough under his elbows.

“I don’t trust you,” he said.

“You don’t have to. You just have to let it happen.”

The wine poured. The initial drops headed too straight on and conjured coughs. While Harry’s hand shot to steady the box, another cautious hand settled in the angle of his throat and chin.

“Is it soft, ripe and elegant?” Nick asked as he poured.

Harry made an attempt to answer. Beads of wine escape his mouth and trailed along his cheeks, curled around his earlobe. He coughed and jerked up. Another bout of wine dappled the terrace and Nick’s shirt and Harry took the railing to steady himself.

“Soft, ripe,” Nick said, “And elegant.”

Harry snorted. “What?”

Nick showed him the fine golden scripture on the side of the box. The box now sported crunched edges and clucked when twisted towards the torches lining the promenade, and certain parts of the writing was buckled. Nick kept running his finger over it, as if he could dust off the damage.

“Was it?” he asked again.

“It was certainly not elegant, was it?” Harry wiped his mouth. He had no plans of helping Nick’s shirt. “First time I drank this was with you. First time I had wine, come to think of it.”

“Oh, really?”

“I thought you picked it out on purpose.”

“Was it over at my place? No, I wouldn’t have bought this, or dared to… I wouldn’t have thought Anne to let me offer.”

“Over Christmas dinner at mine. It’s not my first choice, but it’s definitely grown on me.”

“You were young and impressionable! Difficult to wipe off that initial taste, innit?”

Harry leaned into him. He felt for the fortune in his pocket, didn’t unfurl it. “When do we start owning up to our actions, instead of brushing them under the rug?”

“You couldn’t have known what it’d taste like. I mean, the taste descriptions don’t make any sense. But that’s not what you’re thinking about.”

“I have to leave, after your birthday. I need to see mum, be with her.”

“Is that what you want, or what you feel obliged to do? You could stay here.”

“I was the one who walked out on her. I’ll have to die with that knowledge, without knowing if she’s forgiven me. She might’ve understood my reasoning, but she…” Harry’s fist crunched around the fortune, which sprinkled its edges in a bed of snow in his pocket. “She can’t possibly know that I’m not the same person who walked out on her.”

This time, Nick let the silence bleed out for a moment. Then he said, “But don’t you think she would? Anne was a very sympathetic person.”

The image of Nick atop an empire of people resurfaced in Harry’s mind. Heady from the wine and talk still circling his mind from indoors, he struggled to piece together its meaning.

“Don’t think about things like that tonight,” Nick said. “Let me know when you’ve had enough of this and we’ll head to the suite. You have all the time in the world to stay.”

It struck Harry how alone they were, further isolated by the hubbub around the dinner table, trapped in the wraps of smoke from a couple at the end of the terrace. The world was all hard edges, but somehow Harry felt soft around him. It was as if the past years had only served to hone his heart, grinded it to the bone in odd places he liked to dip his nails into while in hotel rooms or mulling in the studio. In some places, it hadn’t been weathered down, but rather caressed by someone withholding his usual tools of destruction. Albeit jagged, and patchy with damage, but still beating.

Harry couldn’t put this into words, so he said, “It’s not indecent if I go upstairs and have a shower, right? Considering the amount of time you have put into this night. I know I delayed it.”

“Half of us aren’t even in there. Or conscious.” Nick looked somewhere behind them, the weight of his gaze heightened by the lanterns. “Oh, but you can’t actually shower. Well, you could. There just wouldn’t be any hot water. Some people don’t realise that we still have days left that might demand showers. If you want another body to keep you company…”

Harry lifted himself on Bambi-legs, then hoisted the Merlot as an afterthought, a question scribbled across his face.

“It honestly might be warmer,” Nick answered. As Harry coaxed a few drops from the sealed tap on their amble across the terrace, he broke in a smile, shaking his head.

Nick pointed out another fire escape, this one with its feet on the shrubby side of the sand, its bolted lock snapped apart into two jagged claws. A chain slithered off in the grass, one which Harry crossed with light feet when swinging himself into the staircase. He deposited the box of wine on an adjacent step. The metal took his spine as he folded back,

Nick walking up to him with a doting look. It pressed squared patterns into Nick’s palm with which he supported himself, hand in the dawning tufts in Harry’s neck.

“If you pour the rest of the wine on me now, we’ll have a proper Flashdance moment,” Harry said.

“But what are we then going to use for the shower?”

“Here, put your hand across my mouth.”

The hard edges conjured huffs from them both as their weight moved and Nick’s palm came over his mouth, after a few attempts. Harry flicked his tongue out.

Nick made an impressed noise. “Is that how it’s going to be?”

Nick watched him. Harry melted through the yawning metal. He was sure the staircase would liquefy as well where his joints flamed on the metal.

He said, “I certainly hope so.”

As they swept up the stairs and through the hallways, the fortune blew from Harry’s pocket and into the dust.

_A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory_


	10. A funeral

**12 DAYS LEFT, AUGUST 9th, a funeral**

When Harry took the Jeep for a drive that day, he didn’t know it would be his last. He also couldn’t understand how the radio was still functioning, only barely wavering between an international broadcast and, from what Sylvester had perceived, a local gang who had overthrown the island’s most prominent station and now used it for personalised messages and obscure humour sketches.

Each time Harry’s gaze flicked to the leaves lodged in the windshield wiper, he skimmed the receipt stuck in a similar fashion between his steering fingers. It was written with Nick’s familiar handwriting, boisterous from indifference to the remaining space on the paper, and sported four whole lines of text, some with only two words and a general time.

“What’s next on the list?” Harry asked, fully aware that he would be able to see it better than his passenger, wanting to fill out the silence.

“Get mixtape, visit bakery, see the sunset, check if Señor Jorge’s pub is still open,” Sylvester read aloud, then concluded, “Either he’s like this by nature, or you two are playing a game.”

“Could you look at the map for me?”

“ _Be a darling,_ ” Sylvester mocked and shook open the tourist folder. Hotly red circled parts of street names, parks, and tourist traps, sometimes with a helpful connotation. Often, there weren’t connotations.

In the corner of his eye, Harry supposed Sylvester was measuring distance with his thumb and index finger. There was the sound of a marker being uncapped, followed by the tip squeaking across the glossy paper.

“I know where we _aren’t_ going,” Sylvester said, to himself as much as to Harry. “Did he mention anything about a scrapyard?”

“I can't remember."

“Too much wine, sex, or stress?”

Via Sylvester’s directions, they headed into a town neither had had the chance to visit.

Harry said, “Yes.”

“I just feel like we’re heading to the scrapyard either way. Notice how we’re moving away from the basement casinos, though. As far as I and the map can tell. Hang on, there’s a spa up here.”

The Jeep crawled along the streets, whose only inhabitants were waltzing plastic bags and Red Cross flyers.

“No, no, the car can keep moving, I just meant, like, hang on.”

They didn’t have much leeway here and might have been forced to walk if there had been a crowd out. The radio stations narrowed in on one, where a re-enactment of a famous sketch offered pre-recorded audience laughter to the desolate scene.

It brought Harry’s thoughts back to the three of them huddled in front of _One Foot In The Grave_ , especially on Thursday evenings, when his mum had an early afternoon and he and Gemma didn’t begin until noon on Friday. Many wits and puns had passed over his head, even during his later attempts at watching the show, but it had been easy to carry along with it while his mum and Gemma. Anne rarely cracked up, and more regularly just smiled and solved a crossword puzzle with the chatter as background noise.

Oftentimes, Harry recalled finding himself wondering if Gemma grasped the jokes on-screen, if the two of them were in on something Harry wasn’t, or if she was as clueless as him. He wished he had asked her.

He let the thought stay with him, then let it go. It would be fine like this, too. It was only the end of all things. Thinking forward on what was to come, on how he had woken up that morning with a beautifully aching body and a smile above him, warmth spilled across his scalp and puddled in the dip of his spine. He was young behind the wheel.

The car proceeded with more energy than before, just as Sylvester mumbled something about subtlety.

The instructions were monotone, and during the dead moments in the car, Sylvester would glance out of the window with a frown, which Harry didn’t believe to come from trying to decipher the radio program.

“This is much more of a fun and relaxing time, wouldn’t you say?” Harry said, tone bordering on a whistle.

Sylvester’s tone, however, had boiled down to its bare bones. “Than…? Having sex? Playing cards with the ladies at the Mandala?”

People had begun filling into the streets. It had been a long time since Harry had seen so many destructive tan lines and sunhats in one single glance.

“I can’t be the only one in this car thinking about Vegas,” he said.

Sylvester snorted, and when he turned back to his window, Harry could swear there was a smile there.

“How old are you, even?” Sylvester asked, some minutes later.

“What’d you guess for?”

“Can’t be older than Lionel. Not with tattoos like that. Or with a face that smooth.”

Harry’s hand took his neck, briefly.

“And Lionel is, what? Twenty-eight?”

The houses around them opened up into a street passable by two cars in width and bared a fountain, gouged of water. No plants crawled between the broken stone, but someone had placed a Fedora on one of the fixtures at the mouth of the fountain. Harry laughed.

“You’re hauling these numbers out of your arse, man,” he said.

Circling closer around the fountain, he appreciated a moustache below the fixture’s nose made out of what appeared to be straws and cement. One of its arms had fallen victim to the forklift that had demolished half of the fountain, now stuffed halfway into a bakery.

They parked in the hollow of the fountain, but Harry stayed at the wheel, incredulous.

“He is not a day over thirty, and that’s my final offer,” Sylvester said, contaminated by a laughter of his own. Sunrays dusted the windshield, their skin. “Back before you came, he mentioned something about what he wanted to do for his thirtieth. Lest he’s had it in the quiet, during these months, he ain’t thirty.”

“Okay, so what about me? Surely I’m younger than you.”

“Now you’re just taking the piss.”

“What’s your age, again?”

“Twenty-four.”

Harry shook his head and got out of the car. Sylvester followed, stunned for a moment by the scene in front of them, as if he hadn’t kept his nose pressed to the window during their drive.

Where the forklift had busted through the impressive fencing around the scrapyard now resided an equally impressive hole, which had twisted the toothy wires outward like they had been blasted there. It made it seem as if it was beckoning them, something that might have caused worry when paired with the blood-clotted bricks in the bakery’s ruins, if Harry hadn’t been in such a devastatingly good mood.

When Sylvester came to, Harry was passing through the fence with only a scratch to the calf. He followed.

“How is that funny? So, you place somewhere between the two of us. Twenty-four as well?”

“You could dream,” Harry said.

“Twenty-six?”

“It’s very difficult to say, but I’d still pick a guess that the average age of the people we dined with last night is higher than you and me both. Not combined.”

A chair had been poised on top of an assembled pile of garbage, in which there sat a man doodling in a notebook. This caused Harry to pause as well. The two of them stared up at the man, who, much alike the tourists in town, sported a sunhat that shaded half of the garbage hill. He didn’t hear or care that they approached.

“Did you bring the map?” Harry asked.

Sylvester unfolded it, ransacking the mementos. “Doesn’t say anything about this guy. This should be the place for our mixtape, though. Best to just…”

He marched ahead, halting at the foot of the hill. The man peeked over the notebook, then resumed jotting furiously.

“Nick Grimshaw,” Harry called out.

The man shrugged with an almost offended expression, jotting, jotting.

“Maybe he’s used a different name?” Harry said and joined Sylvester. “If any name at all? We’re supposed to pick up a mixtape.”

“Hey!” The man flashed his marker at them. “A sensitive topic, if I may. Do any of you like math?”

“Sure,” Sylvester said. “Ah, we’re decent. Maybe you could come down here and we could discuss…” He made a vague gesture.

The man deliberated. A moment later, he tucked the marker behind his ear and scuffled down the hill, the string of his sunhat dangling deep below his chin. On either side of his face drooped cheeks of a Basset Hound. He presented them with a Sudoku puzzle, completely crossed over and redrawn without any numbers below the original square.

“Help a brother out,” he said, uncapping the marker. “My iPad ran out of data, so then I threw it down the mountain, and apparently then the reception disappeared, but not entirely, only in patches across the island, so I’ve been touring a bit. I was waiting for my father-in-law to contact me, you see, but there’s no use now, so I feel like the best thing for me right now is to devote my time to some brain gymnastics. You know?”

“Sure,” Sylvester said.

“What is the deal with the mixtape?” Harry insisted.

“So, are you friends of Nick’s, or…?”

“We’re here because of the birthday party,” Sylvester said amidst scribbling in new numbers in the Sudoku square. “Picking up a… mixtape. Whatever that’s a euphemism for.”

“Something I’ll never use otherwise. You doing good with that crossword?”

Sylvester hummed in distress. He’d paused and ogled the paper. Anew he began flicking the marker into numbers.

“Does your dad know you’re here?” Harry asked.

“Twenty questions – good one. Haven’t been in touch with a lot of people since the reception went. Until your friends popped by, but that was pre-blackout. Was a bit of a de-railing here in the trash bank, as you might’ve noticed.” At this, the man gestured off to the forklift. “Yeah. Nick didn’t fancy it either. Maybe I should do something about that. Maybe tomorrow.”

Sylvester handed the puzzle over, marker capped and attached to the paper. The man took off his sunhat with a cheeky look, grabbed it and bowed before them. He nodded them along the path to the fountain, nosing the Sudoku.

They took the door next to the forklift when entering the bakery. Brick crumbed next to them, sheathing their boots and sandals in dust. Bags of coffee beans lined the shelf behind the counter, some broken open with beans ground into the racks in a cascade of chalk and blackboard. Even some pastries remained behind the spider-webbed glass, and the man lifted one of these out to them. Both declined. Still with his nose in the puzzle, the man tried to deposit the pastry on a shelf but tipped it over on the floor.

“I don’t get why he’s so fond of it,” the man said, rummaging in the back. “I don’t… There’s nothing to play it on, around here. I’ve scavenged for a few days now but haven’t come across anything of use.”

“Actual cassette,” Harry mouthed, when the man handed the mixtape over.

He fiddled with something else behind the counter. “It’s made for my girl. Suppose he’s got a lover to woo, somewhere. That’s what I reckon. No luck in scoring a broadcast overseas

now, though, with the reception and the…” He blinked, out of a daze. His eyes seemed to always squint beneath the hills of his cheeks. “Do you reckon I could ride along into town with you? Drop me off at Jorge’s pub? I’m supposed to meet a friend there.”

“Happy Hour must be well under way.”

“Actually, we’re not heading into town,” Sylvester said, tapping his nose ring. “We’re heading up the mountain to fetch an ice sculpture.”

“Oh, well you could drop me off there as well. I could see dad.”

“I meant…” Sylvester jerked the map up, but his eyes ran too fast across it to possibly register anything. “South. We’re heading back South, where we came from. Need to read these instructions better. Nick’s got some shitty handwriting. So, we must be off. Thank you for the tape, I’m sure he’s got a plane— a plan, for how to listen to it. I’m sure it’s great.”

“Suppose I can just walk,” the man said as an afterthought, with a small shrug. “Ought to take the forklift, eh?”

Sylvester laughed, then excused himself from the bakery. The man still gleamed from his joke.

“See you around,” Harry said, partly like an apology, and followed.

The drive to town wasn’t quick. Sylvester had resumed the position where his nose touched the window and his chin deeply sunk into his palm, the smoothness of his face flecked by the sun of noon. No witty remarks about pedestrians escaped him. Harry worried that the end of the world was starting to catch up to him, too, like it had with Lionel.

Harry kept tight on the wheel, sunglasses low on his nose and a leisurely hand in his hair, eyes roving. Each time Sylvester moved the slightest without even a breath, Harry rearranged his grip, fingers sore from the strain. Now, towards lunch, masses milled in the streets. In front of a day-care centre up ahead, two ashen-haired gentlemen played cards while receiving input from mothers, perhaps a wife, with babies on their hips. The actual centre sported boards across most of the windows.

Sylvester seemed to note this as well, where they skulked along with the car, and exhaled.

“All right,” Harry said, “Why are you sulking?”

Sylvester didn’t acknowledge him.

“For once, we’re well-off. Other than a few detours, we found the junkyard, we’ve a massive place to stay in where you don’t have to worry about being alone and we don’t have to worry about the riots. We’ve survived.”

“We have to bury her.”

“It says that on the list? So, what? Check the grocer’s, fetch a mixtape, an ice sculpture, _bury a body_. Where the hell—”

“Harry, we need to bury Amelia.”

Harry’s hand dropped from his hair to trace the scratch on his calf. Tracing, then scrunching the flesh.

“But we can’t. It’s too late for us. What we can do is make the best of what we’ve got right here, right now. It’s too late to go back.”

Sylvester’s head lifted from his palm. The shake of his head was decisive. “I’m aware of the technicalities of it, okay? It’s been weeks, she ain’t gonna be the same. She ain’t gonna smell pretty. But before she’s just bones, we need to set things straight for her.”

“She won’t have that time. Some vices you just have to live with.” Harry fought with the scowl overcoming him, keeping his gaze just high enough to see the street, at most the necks of pedestrians. “She left us here, anyway—”

Sylvester sat up with such vigour that Harry’s feet sank on the gas pedal, and the wheel jerked, torqueing the Jeep through a clothing rack and laundry baskets. Blouses welled across the windshield in a flurry of flowers and softly striped cotton, their soak slamming against the glass.

While Harry did his best to swerve past a trough of mothers, Sylvester frothed, “We fucking chose to come here – you did! No plans, no destinations, no nothing. Only reason we didn’t leave _while we could_ —” Sylvester paired it with air quotations, “—Was because none of us even wanted to. We were all on the same page.”

“How could we’ve been, when all it took was one bad game of poker before Lionel snapped on her?”

“But he isn’t the only one who’s killed before.”

Harry chafed the Jeep along one of the discoloured buildings. The left rear-view mirror snapped and splintered the driver’s window, glass on glass, metal spearing metal as it bounded off in the dust behind them.

“You can have me as moral support. Leave me outside and I’ll buy us ice-cream while you handle her.”

“Step up, now, for once. She needs us, and I need you. You know I can’t go there by myself. She wasn’t deserving of this, and yet here you are, saying you’re doing something even though— You aren’t dealing with it, you’re just ignoring it.”

“Not the point. That’s not the point. It’s not her I’m worried about.”

Sylvester said something, or asked him something, but Harry couldn’t hear over the heartbeat in his ears, even as the Jeep was gradually slowing down here, on the broader streets.

“We’re fine now,” he said. “There’s no need to go back and drag it all up again—”

“Stop the car.”

“—You can just move on. It’s fine.”

“Stop the _car_.”

Harry obeyed. Gravelling, the Jeep pulled up next to a bank, which windows mostly resided on the pavement, and were picked up by kids passing by.

Harry stared at his hands. They glimmered with sweat, or pearls of glass.

“You’re probably right,” Sylvester said. “You aren’t fit to help her. You can’t even drive a damn car anymore.”

“There are still things we haven’t collected; we have to meet with the dancers, check on the ice sculpture…”

“I’ll drive. Get out of the car.”

Harry remained, grinding his hands around the wheel. Partly, he expected to feel Sylvester’s gaze on him.

Once he’d gotten out, he rolled into the passenger seat, sunglasses pressed into his cheekbones.

Firing up the tired engine, Sylvester shook his head. “You don’t give a shit about any of it.”


	11. Shotgun and pepperoni

**12 DAYS LEFT, AUGUST 9th, shotgun and pepperoni**

They rendezvoused with other branches of searchers at a pizza parlour. Some weeks prior, they had sat on the roof of that parlour, leaking ice-cream cones in hand and a tattoo needle drilling into their skin. Ian and Aimee had ordered a pepperoni special and dissected it with fingers as much as with cutlery.

“No luck with the ice sculpture,” Sylvester said as he had barely touched the seat. Unlike the rest of the shop, it was still padded, but hadn’t evaded the smell of butted cigarettes, floor wax and fry. A family of ants roamed the table’s legs. Harry borrowed a chair from another table to sit by them, folding his arms across its back to rest his chin there. He twisted the toe of his boots into the ant family.

Aimee pushed the pizza over to their shared corner, rubbing her thumb on a handful of paper-thin napkins. The paper broke.

“What’s the deal?” Sylvester asked.

“Well, he isn’t supposed to know about it, is what,” Aimee answered, nodded at the map halfway up on the table from his lap. “So, you’ve got notes. Does it say what the motive is?”

“George and Alexa might’ve very well written in some locations,” Ian said. “The three of them were here first of us all, yeah?”

The table hummed with agreement. Harry eased a hand forward to seize a slice, flicking off the pepperonis. He should have bargained for some of the pastries at the bakery. Although, there had been an awful lot of dust and brick bits in there, so he might’ve ended up biting into a snap of metal.

“We picked up the mixtape,” he said.

Sylvester asked, “Where is Alexa?”

“She’s ill. Didn’t get rid of her cough, so we’re having her drink loads of hot lime and lemon water,” Ian said.

Outside the wall-broad windows swayed the palm trees, ruffled by ocean as much as by beach-goers. From the footage they showed on the news, of the feast of mayhem and irrationality back in London and other metropoles, it seemed incredulous that this was part of the same reality. Only a kite caught in branches or a child crying over a scraped knee marred the scenery. Sure, there had been reports of riots on the northern coast, but that was barely worth mentioning next to pictures of Buckingham in flames.

Farther along the beach – Harry’s knee jumped – stood the complex where they had initially crashed. It had been ideal, hadn’t it? Close to the tourist traps and take-out establishments, the promenade, tattoo parlours, gambler’s dens and the sun.

Grease and ham squelched in his mouth and he wondered about the smell in the flat, if someone had entered, maybe closed the windows, thrown in a couple of air-fresheners. She might not even be there, anymore. Someone might have taken her body. It would be in lieu with the stuff on the radio, when all the fun channels had stopped broadcasting.

Something exploded between his teeth. It oozed in his mouth. He jerked a hand up to spit in, resisting the impulse to claw at his tongue. Someone shoved a water towards him. The

more he drank, the more the vague taste of petrol pinched his consciousness, even after the coal-like crunch vanished with the water.

“Must’ve been a hot as hell pepperoni,” Sylvester said with but a trace of humour in his voice.

When Harry looked up, only the two of them were left at the table. A slab of pizza remained on the carton between them, swarmed by diverse insects until Aimee swatted them so her earrings bounded like small suns below her lobes, seemingly for the umpteenth time. Ian stood at the door, holding it open while watching the scene. The bell above it still weakly cried.

“More like a fly,” Aimee said.

“Are you leaving?” Harry asked.

“We’ve got business to arrange, haven’t we? Likely won’t be back until dinner. We’re thinking of going to this private beach for sunset, just for a little while, watching dolphins and unicorns and whatnot. Same old stuff.”

“What do you want us to pick up at the pharmacy?” Sylvester said, twirling some crust in the soggy carton.

“Honestly, if there’s anything left at all to pick – take all of it. Bring back some buckets worth of it. If not Alexa, I’m sure someone else will find great use for it.”

Ian cried, still at the door, “Nausea tablets and snack bars for Pix!”

Sylvester finger-gunned him.

“If he doesn’t have another mixtape…” Aimee shrugged.

“Yeah,” Harry said. He pushed the glass away from him. “Wait, what?”

The bell rejoiced as the door knocked open and shut. Sylvester looked at him.

“The current deal,” Sylvester spoke, his words dragging themselves out his mouth, “Is we return the mixtape and fetch pharmaceuticals for Alexa, while they go up the mountain. The motif of the sculpture is, apparently, worth concealing even with this deadline.”

“So, they take the ice sculpture off of our hands?”

Sylvester finished off the drinks Ian and Aimee had left behind. The other occupants of the parlour had also gone. Some of them might’ve been acquaintances of Nick’s.

“And we’ve got something else to do beforehand,” Harry said.

They got up to leave when he caught the eye of the lonesome chunk of person behind the counter. The cook’s face marinated in the steam of fry and regular body odour. Sylvester was already out the door, so Harry raked his pockets for a bill and tucked it under a dry piece of carton before leaving.

“You want another trip to the tattooist’s? That’s to say, my nimble fingers,” Sylvester said, paired with dancing fingers once they were in the car.

“I thought you’d mention someone else’s nimble fingers.”

As soon as the realisation had come over Harry, he wondered if either of them knew they were back on speaking terms.

“We should bring the Jeep, yeah? Never mind if she smells, I just… If there’s anyone left in that building. Or on the streets.”

Sylvester assessed him. “Large trunk.”

“Yeah.”

“Loads of backseat as well.”

Harry pretended to study the neighbourhood, but with its peeling blue height in the sparse quarters, the building wasn’t to be overlooked.

It wasn’t until he glanced over to the driver’s seat that he realised they were moving forward.

***

The smell came over them at the foot of the staircase. It wasn’t the foreboding tickle in the air that Harry had noted the last time he visited. It wasn’t mollified by detergent or wall of heat from outside. Barely a handful of townsfolk passed by the building, and even fewer cars drove it by, refusing to lend their cloak of exhaust. This stench demanded acknowledgement.

Harry kneeled by the overturned laundry basket on the first steps, stirred a hand around the garments. He shied at a few pieces that might have touched him back, dug deeper. Behind him, Sylvester shifted, arms crossed then behind his head then swinging at his sides.

Harry emerged from the pile with a ripped blouse tied over his mouth and nose.

“Should have made the grave first, I think,” Harry said. He tossed over another tear of the blouse. Sylvester let it be. Side by side, they sought to conquer the stairs.

Sylvester asked, “Do you want to go back and fix it?”

“I’d just… Rather not be here.”

Most of the doors they came upon were closed, possibly swept shut by the gust of decay from flat 304. Sylvester soldiered with a pinched nose and barely wavered from their path. Harry found himself leaning into every open crevice. Thought about splashing his cloth with detergent, cracking open another window, talking to a tenant. Past the rooms, they might as well have been in a graveyard already.

Harry rationalised that there couldn’t be a smell strong enough to surpass the atmosphere, to whirr in his nostrils. Yet he distinctly tasted a woman’s perfume.

“I feel like you and I will have a talk soon,” Sylvester said.

They left the first floor behind them.

“Will you chase me down with your shovel? Fuck, shovels…” Gulls cried in the roof nooks. The stairs creaked under his hesitant foot, just for a second. “Hope you have a burial ground planned out. Did she even want to be buried? Do we know? Did she leave a note? We haven’t planned this at all.”

“You usually prepare?”

 _304_. Nothing else on the plaque.

Harry sighed and in return, his tongue received some threads of blouse. “You can’t make this less difficult.”

“More for my own sake, Styles. Honestly.”

Sylvester put a palm to the wood, looked back at him.

Rain hung in the air. The birds must have sensed it.

“Well, I can’t go in.”

“Are you seriously bailing on me now?”

“Olsson, I will never wash this smell off of me.”

“Neither will I.”

They stared at each other.

“I can’t.”

“This leaves more for our talk,” Sylvester said. If there had been a sliver of humour in his voice, it had cut his vocal chords. He tied up his piece of blouse.

When he had entered, Harry swayed in the hallway. He counted awry nails in the floorboards, wondered if any of the four of them had stubbed their toe on a drunken night. There weren’t enough nails to keep him busy.

Rain had darkened the interior, pummelling the window at the far end of the corridor. In fleeting thoughts, he tried to locate the familiarity of the perfume, growing ever heady in his skull. Amelia’s? He hadn’t ever thought of her scent before, but it might still have made an impression. Most of her had he familiarised via booze and denied stripping. She could have been a magnificent gambler, if he had remembered.

“Lionel would have…”

Harry’s head jerked from wherever it had been, but the sound had died away. Scuffing sounded from 304, which was somehow at the end of the corridor, now. The slamming of rain on the window was right behind him. But then came Sylvester’s voice again.

“He might’ve started talking about what we’re made of. As humans. Like, why…” It was quiet for a long time, only cut by sharp inhales from inside. “Talk about amino acids with decomposition and sunshine and this— this fucking _heat_.”

The corridor was cool. No matter the weather, there had ought to be some use he could do. Lifting his foot, Harry looked down at squelching mud. It trickled down to the lower floor and grew around his soles. It was now, while eyeing the pool, that he heard another presence.

Someone was on the phone in an adjacent room.

He tried the door to 306. Locked. He felt around the corridor, coming upon a single unlocked door, which he slid through.

The bed was made and the bathroom vacant, but there was a telephone on the nightstand, its cord shivering as the handset twirled on the floor. He could imagine it being twirled around someone’s finger in idle conversation. The handset was cold to the touch when he lifted it to put it back, but he lingered, stroked his thumb across where the ear would’ve rested. It sounded as if someone lilted on the other side of the line, as if the conversation had never died.

Harry picked at a string from the ceiling fan, which on one hand drooped against the headboard and on one hand aimed to drill through the ceiling. Time didn’t move in here. Could it even go backwards?

The rain drained outside, slamming becoming pattering becoming brushes. When he entered the bathroom, the room simmered in the afternoon glow, and the sounds from 304 crept into the room. The shower curtain only sustained a touch of mould, so he curled two fists into the textiles and slit it from its hinges.

Nothing squeaked beneath his feet on the way back, and he listened to Sylvester’s small talk inside the flat for a moment. He mustn’t have realised he was alone.

“I brought something,” Harry said, during a lull in the monologue.

“Okay. I’m pretty much done.”

Harry tipped the door open and cast his head away at the onslaught. He sent the shower curtain through.

“Oh,” came from inside. “This is actually patterned. And not as slippery as ours.”

Then Sylvester peered out of the doorway to where Harry leaned cross-armed against the wall.

“Does it help?” Harry asked. “Can you still see her? I wanted to drench it in detergents— There should be some downstairs—”

“It won’t do anything. Help me carry her.”

“Or sheets. Shit, there are so many rooms around here, and the laundry basket downstairs—”

“Harry.”

Harry fought against taking a deep breath, but the smell still tickled him. It wasn’t far through the door, yet…

“Harry,” Sylvester said. “Please. Otherwise we’ll stand here all afternoon, and we’ve got stuff—” His voice broke. He fell back into the room, nudging the door open.

Harry’s eyes screwed shut, burning.

He went in the general direction of the plastic mass he’d glimpsed and heard, “I’ve got her head, don’t worry.”

No rain hoisted the hairs on Harry’s skin when they made it outside. Dust flourished in the wake of his soles, coasted around the wheels of the Jeep. Sun beaded in the plastic weight between them, pillaging Harry’s eyelids, and he casted his eyes inland, where mellow skies braced for a mellow night. Surreal.

They might have had a conversation on their way down the stairs, that Harry just didn’t remember, but they moved together towards the flatbed. His grip was as loose around her as it could be. Even when he’d let her go, something weighed his hands and heart.

Leather seats burned their skin when they headed out of the city. Harry couldn’t keep track of where they drove; he kept looking at his hands.

When Sylvester parked, Harry couldn’t tell if they’d driven north or south, but they were out of town. It had become cloudy, either way, so the sun no longer crowned the miles of caked beach around them, but rather promised its return on the cusp of horizon. It couldn’t be sunset, yet, he thought.

The shovel in his hand was nothing like the boiling Jeep. The ocean overwhelmed him with its vast scent of nothing. Only a pinch of salt told him they hadn’t ended up in either’s imagination. The landscape bore close similarities to his own dreams. If they were unlucky, they would see the sun crash upon the ocean, as flames swept their flesh from their bones.

“This might be insensitive to ask, right now,” Sylvester said, “So don’t answer unless you want to, but I don’t know if anyone has anything to lose anymore, you know?” Then they continued in silence for a while, to the point where Harry wondered if he had imagined the words. “Have you never gotten rid of a body?”

“There has to be a first time for everything.”

The scooped sand weighed nothing, even clustered by water as it was. A breeze fluttered in the curtain around Amelia, still reclined on the flatbed. She didn’t make much of a fuzz. This, Harry remembered of her, must be characteristic of being dead.

It should have been harder to bury her.

Harry caved. “Weren’t we supposed to have a talk right now? A non-hitman talk, from what I’ve figured out. Then we should say something, for her. Right?”

Sylvester rested his hands and chin against the shovel’s handle, long enough for Harry to perceive the gesture, before carrying on hollowing.

“I was more hoping you’d be the one to drive the conversation.”

“My sister died,” Harry said. “Was post-announcement, so, you know.”

Sylvester hummed. “Did you see the body?”

“I did.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve never seen anyone. Until this island, I suppose. Maybe you’re right; there’s a first time for everything.”

“Lionel must’ve seen a lot,” Harry said.

“Well, he doesn’t talk much about it. Same as you. Okay, so it was a sibling business, and then what? Fill me in.”

“It wasn’t… Now you’ve got it all wrong. It was one of those days, just having tea or whatever went on back home. She’d flown back after the announcement, as had I, back to the nest. And mum… Yeah. Mum was just thrilled at seeing the two of us again at the same time. Many afternoons were spent playing board games, cooking, watching this old TV-series we all liked.”

“Sounds like the golden family.”

They didn’t shovel as methodically as before. More and more stray digs were made, put a pit had started to bloom in the beach.

“They’d put up all kinds of notes and hotlines in the neighbourhood,” Harry said, “So one day Gemma came back with this ad for a hitman for hire. And she started talking about how it could grant a lot of people their final wish— I mean, you’ve seen the kind of people who have been on the streets since Matilda.”

“Harry,” Sylvester said, “How big of a thing were you? Like, you’re saying this like you were global and not some small Nebraskan hotshot.”

“I’m thirty,” Harry said instead. “Might have figured that out already.”

The removal of sand and shovels piercing rocks filled the air. Then, slowly, Sylvester said, “This sure is a day of surprises.”

“But you’ve never killed a person.”

“No. That’s usually how it works.”

“It’s just hard to believe you ended up here with two hitmen.” Harry tried to lose himself in the digging, but his thoughts crawled out of his mouth. “Speaking of which, we should… I want to talk about Lionel, if we’re talking.”

“He’s a bit of a loose cannon, yeah.”

“If he comes back, he’ll at least kill me. Probably you as well.”

Sylvester squirmed. His digs had become more unfocused, nearly severing Harry’s toes at one point.

“I know what you said, but I was just thinking: you’ve never killed anyone.”

“And I don’t want to.”

“Lionel taught you how to use a gun, right? Thinking about the pilot, that’s just a worst-case scenario. I mean, out of all the scenarios where we aren’t murdered or mutilated.”

“We had a solid agreement. Why can’t you do it anymore?”

“I’m scared.”

“So am I!” Neither dug anymore. “Killing a person has never been on _my_ bucket list.”

“That’s my point. I can’t do it again.”

“But it wouldn’t matter to you if you killed him. But Harry, I would give a shit. I do, about him.”

Sylvester watched him for a second, then turned his face to the overcast horizon. His hands were taut around the shovel handle. Harry’s gaze sunk to his own fingers, unfurled and lax. He crawled out of the pit and reached a hand down in aid.

“Must be done,” he said. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that things could have been different before he came to Vegas, between the two of them. Not to mention Amelia. The three of them had already sunken into each other’s lives by the time Harry came around, beat and high.

He had nearly received a fist to his eye going up against Lionel in blackjack. Instead, they’d gone for drinks and purchased a cheap piece of wood with five strings and one additional that would not be tuned. Not until that night had he come back to their hotel room, witnessed the plethora of bathroom articles of various hotel brands and minibar bills that would never be paid. He’d been welcomed, there.

But Sylvester had already experienced that, with Lionel. With Amelia.

“There’s a chance we won’t see him again,” Harry said as they carried Amelia. “And then this conversation will have been for nothing.”

“There’s a chance,” Sylvester said.

They lowered her into the pit. The ocean had started to rise, not yet nibbling at the corners of the grave, but approaching.

“If he shows up, and he means trouble, I’ll do it. However—”

“Realistically, it’s more likely that he’ll stop gambling than that he’ll come back for peace.”

Harry just nodded. He twisted his hands into each other, spinning his ring. Enough time had passed, with Sylvester concocting a speech, for him to remain silent, so he did.

***

Sylvester took the building. “Sir, this is not the mixtape we were supposed to pick up today. It’s getting dark, we’d like to go home, you’d like to have us out of _your_ home, etcetera.”

Small mammals scurried inside the bakery, fronting the junkyard, but the building didn’t hold the man they searched. Harry put his hands on his hips.

“That will make him come out,” Sylvester said, turning bricks and curtains dappled around the room.

“His throne was empty. He ought to be in here.”

“Or in town, as he was saying.”

“I hope he isn’t. Only thing left on our list is this damn mixtape. I wouldn’t have thought the ice sculpture would be harder to arrange, but here we are.”

“He might _hear_ you, be polite!” Porcelain smashed against the floor somewhere in the bellows of the bakery. “The sculpture only made due because it wasn’t our responsibility. I’m curious of its motif.”

Thoughts of how he hadn’t been this productive in months collided with thoughts of the dinner they would have that night, of the arms he could roll into afterwards. Oh, the amount of karaoke that would go down. Harry shivered.

“Oh,” Sylvester said, and it was too close to the _oh_ he had emitted in room 304 for Harry to be all right with it.

“Olsson.”

Sylvester came towards him before Harry had the chance to search. His hand still lodged the mixtape.

“We might have to settle with this one,” he said. “He’s dead.”

Harry threw his hands in the air.

“I think he did it himself,” Sylvester continued. “Maybe because of his dad. There probably isn’t another tape for us here.”

“Who?”

“His father-in-law. The pilot.”

It was said in a tone that demanded Harry to make sense of it, but he couldn’t. Instead he swept a jar of coffee beans to the ground and threaded his fingers into his hair. The task was easier when he had more to grab on to.

“Can you…” Sylvester’s lips tightened, as did the hand around the mixtape.

“Is there another pilot?”

“No. No, the guy in the mountains. He was talking about his daughter, right, and her ex?”

“This is fantastic. I wonder if I’ve ever met a more incompetent person than him. It’s not fair what he’s done to you, but look at this. I’m sure by the time he comes back, there won’t be a finger on his hand that isn’t soaked in blood.”

“Can you…” Sylvester tried again, jarring.

When Harry looked his way, his arms were out, and something wet hung from his nose ring. Harry wrapped his arms around him.

In a softer voice, he said, “We could do this outside.”

“It doesn’t smell much yet. There just… There isn’t a whole lot left to smell.”

“I remembered something, now. There’s no need to deal with him if he’s off the island, and we’ve been promised a plane.”

“Yeah, but, it could be another hoax.”

“The only reason the first flight was a _hoax_ – I hope you can read my air quotes”—Sylvester snorted into his shoulder—“Was because he wasn’t willing to wait for what he had been promised. This isn’t a hoax. Why did we have to come here, anyway?”

“It was the wrong mixtape.”

“But shouldn’t we have made sure with the others? I could have asked Nick.”

“Aimee and Ian gave us their opinion at lunch.” Sylvester withdrew from him. “How gone were you?”

“Couldn’t think about anything but Amelia. God bless her.”

Sylvester nodded. He held the mixtape up towards the light cruising through the collapsed walls. “This will have to do. Are you sure about the plane?”

“Our only problem,” Harry said when they walked back to the Jeep, “Is if he will listen, or shoot first.”


	12. In a corner of the world

**10 DAYS LEFT, AUGUST 11th, in a corner of the world**

The ocean susurrated through the window, but its reach had decreased since last night, and now Harry needed to strain to hear it. Briefly he had considered perching on the balcony until sunrise, but someone had restocked the minibar and Nick had flashed this ankle bracelet he’d bought at the market, and Harry hadn’t been able to keep from laughing. They had spent at least an hour nursing the strain Nick had contracted to his leg, when it had shot up to display his find.

“Don’t let me guess what you’re thinking about,” Nick said.

Harry didn’t look over, but he heard the sleep in his voice, streaked with a smile.

“Tomorrow is August twelfth,” Harry said. “Lionel is supposed to be back with his family by then.”

One of the towels strewn on the floor came over Harry’s face. He spat. Threads and dust and hair, from the touch of it, swarmed his undefended tongue.

“What is this? Your idea of a wake-up call?”

“You looked so gloomy,” Nick said, now rising to his forearms. “Wanted to break that streak.”

“We’ve never had much time to talk about it. The plane has to take off today.”

“Sure,” he said. “Not that we talked about what happened when you and Olsson came back late for dinner, either.”

“You didn’t seem much up for talking.”

“Neither did you.”

Harry pulled himself up against the headrest of cushions. Arms crossed, his gaze strayed to the curtains just veiling the sea, before it found its way to Nick. It always seemed to.

What he _had_ asked was if Nick had been the only one to put together their shopping list. Nick was supposed to follow along with Collette and the entourage on a hike during most of the next day, so when they hadn’t dined, or taken care of the day’s “shopping”, they had prepared for the hike.

Nick had answered that, no, the journal had wandered between Alexa, George and himself. The ice sculpture was nowhere in sight at the Mandala. Harry had begun suspecting that Aimee and Ian had received their share of the journal as well. In the flurry of bags and sneakers and champagne glasses, he never had a chance to ask.

“When are they coming back?” Harry asked.

“I’d hope this evening. There’s a chance of finding another possible sword-swallower, over the mountains. Also, there’s a bar, on the east coast, which I’ve honestly just heard rumours about. I’ve invested my time in other activities.” His knuckles jutted into Harry’s shoulder. “Collette was very adamant about it.”

“With the indoor fountain of just, booze and booze? And the trophy mount of gecko heads?”

“You’ve been. Of course.”

“And that’s what they’re doing.”

“Among other things.”

Nick rested his head on the hill of duvet in Harry’s lap, hair still sullen with salt when Harry touched it. Coughs sounded somewhere down the hall.

Nick grunted. “I don’t think the drugs are helping.”

“Pharmaceuticals,” Harry said. “Should we try drugs?”

“She is. But it’s been a week, and in this heat – something should have happened. We’ll do something for her tonight, to cheer her up.”

“What are some of her bulletins on the shopping list?”

“Not too many, actually.”

“And George?”

The coughs reappeared, hostile projectiles building with each foot travelled. Nick leaned into his touch, looked past the balcony at the waves.

“Have your jog tomorrow, instead,” he said. “I’m not leaving this bed until you do. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? To just…”

The routine. He’d had a routine, only some time ago. Afternoon sleep-ins, hangover cures, jog, thinking of his family, alcohol, strip poker, nightmares – rinse and repeat.

“To never leave,” Nick finished.

When he spoke, no time had passed, or all of it.

“Wasn’t planning on it, was I?”

After that, it didn’t seem like a great time to bring up the matter of the flight. The hours were running away from him and all that took his mind off of it for a minute was Nick wrapped around him. Nick must have sensed the frequency of his heartbeat. If he had, he must also have dismissed it as lust, for they didn’t talk about the plane then.

***

As the coughing ceased and heightened in a faraway universe, the thick of Harry’s thumbs sunk into Nick’s feet, the spine and crooks of it, over veins and where his skin had been tamed by the ocean’s sand. Pillows hoisted him at the head of the bed, whereas Nick leafed through a digest on the floor, his fingers barely shifting across the paper.

“I’m going over there soon,” Harry said. “Alexa’s.”

Nick wiggled his toes. “I’m sure Aimee’s holed up in there already. Last time I checked, I was offered a pedicure.”

“Understand that you didn’t take them up on the offer.”

“No, because I had you waiting in here – better things to do. And, after all, I’m sort of getting one now.”

“You sort of are, truly. What ever would you do without me?”

“Perish,” Nick answered.

“What year is it from?” Harry asked.

Nick dampened his finger, flicked to the cover page, and read aloud, “’Ronnie Wood lain to rest after months of legal twists – family home becomes museum’, plus the announcement of a new pope. Poor bloke never had the chance to become famous for anything other than being the last pope. Gosh, when was the last time the pope was relevant?”

“For you?” Harry paused the pressure on Nick’s sole in faux thought.

“There’s no honour in being a last anything.”

Harry hummed. “Do you have any toilet paper left?”

After a bit of fiddling, a stripped carton roll flew next to his face. Harry pushed Nick’s feet off of him, unsatisfied.

“He must be having one hell of a time reigning with the apocalypse hailing and everything,” Nick said. His hands scavenged the magazine.

“A marker, then.”

More fiddling. This time, Harry received a pen best suited for crossword puzzles and crossing in advice column quizzes. Nick carried on, “Bet he’s letting the smoke rise all hours of the night in the Vatican. I would. Mad headlines that’d be. Likely not now, though.”

“You would also seal off the area a few nights a week and charge people to bathe in the fountain. Strobes and everything, surely.”

“No, to change songs. To… I’d charge them to take their clothes off. It’d be so hot there, and also a lot more popular place with me in charge. Ever been to the Vatican?”

“Must’ve missed it on my many tours du monde.”

Harry imagined the ink soaking into his bottom lip after the tingle of a fly or wind from the agape windows had piqued his interest. He plucked Nick’s ankle from the bed and uncapped the marker; Nick made a drawn-out “ _eeeh_ ” in response to the cold filter.

“The pope deserves more recognition.”

“Elaborate.” Nick _oooed_ as the marker swept his skin, just below the bracelet. “Please.”

“Everyone is carrying weight these days, but this guy literally has half of the world’s eyes and hopes on his shoulders. And he’s fucking killing it, given the circumstances.” Harry caressed the ink which lightened out in black deltas, tinier and tinier in the outskirts. He kept his eyes low, wondering if he could feel Nick’s heartbeat in his ankle, the way he was so still and tamed. “He’s living. He could have easily run months ago – he’s old enough – dumped the responsibility onto someone else, found meaning.”

“But he’s staying out of a sense of duty, and obviously belief.”

“Obviously,” Harry said in an exhale, breaths calming, or ceasing.

“Tradition?” Nick offered.

Harry shook his head. “Something else. Fear.”

“I thought you didn’t feel fear when you had God backing you up.”

“Don’t mock God.”

“Wasn’t my meaning. And anyway, isn’t it more the pope who’s backing God up? I’d understand if he left. Being forever held responsible for genocides and the apocalypse itself. No one should expect _forever_ from him. Let him have it.”

Voices muttered down the hallway to monotone coughs when, for a second, the door to their room swayed open as someone passed by. A breeze from the windows nudged it closed, the lock mechanism clicking against the splintered wood like raindrops on tin roofs.

By the way Nick’s neck craned and muscle strung against his calves, Harry could tell he was listening in on whatever conversation that door hid from them.

“Forever is a bit much,” Harry said, capping the marker with a faint sound. “I need to know when the flight back will be ready.”

Nick’s skin grew tauter and a muscle in his forearm jerked, only for a moment. It had become more as if he was straining to have his mind elsewhere, than actually having it astray.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I can’t hear anything. Should we go check on her? Or I could, if you’d like to stay here.”

“I can’t just _stay_.”

Nick twisted to look at him with baggy eyes and a look that would have made Harry’s knees weak had he not been sitting down. Still he felt them quiver.

“There’s nothing you wouldn’t want here,” Nick said, but his gaze wavered as if it had lost its footing and now pedalled in the naked air. “We own everything here. I’ve made certain. There’s…. There’s always someone to call, someplace to go.”

Harry pictured him hunched over the journal downstairs at the motel, the wall calendar behind the desk mocking him for days wasted.

“You could have wanted me seven years ago,” he said, then sealed his lips, choking back a sigh. Nick’s gaze suddenly stilled. “I guess I’m saying things could have been different if you had chosen me—”

“In which universe haven’t I chosen you? All of it is for you. The island, just lying here in bed, these damn shores…”

“It’s not all for me.” As Nick straightened up and hoisted his legs partly over the bed, partly around Harry, and his hands roved first sheets then skin, Harry shook his head. “It’s not for me.”

Nick tried to capture his gaze. When Harry’s head sank, he raised it with a gentle push of fingers to the chin.

“It wouldn’t be complete without you. The plane doesn’t matter, because you’re meant to be here. You should be in my life again. Harry, listen—”

“What are you afraid of anymore? Everyone is here for you, and I can say that without exaggerating. I need to go.”

“Is that your guilt speaking or the actual truth? No—” And he tried to steer Harry back to him as Harry made a move to stand. “You know what I mean, love. I can help you if you stay with me, but I don’t know what to do if you leave.”

“I _want_ to go home,” Harry said. He stood, followed by Nick kneeling before him on the bed. “You can’t expect forever from me.”

“I’m expecting a week.”

“All the time that’s left. Let me do what makes me happy.” Nick had closed his eyes. Veins pumped in his knotted fists. “Nick, I need to fly back. I need to know when the plane is taking off.”

“You can’t be sure she’ll forgive you. All of your best bets are here on this… this shitty fucking island. Sure. But I’m here. I love you. You can’t leave. This is the only certainty there is and you know it.”

“She doesn’t have to forgive me, she just needs—” Harry lost himself. His plan was a bridge carried by hope, by faith, which Nick’s words now nipped away at. “Stop.”

“No one here blames you,” Nick reassured.

The bridge collapsed.

“’No one’?” Harry repeated. “How many does that imply? Why do they know?”

“You’re ashamed,” Nick said. He tried to get off the bed. “I understand. They do too. No one is blaming you for what you did. But she’s your mother. Do you really think you’ll be the same person in her eyes?”

“You blame me. You can say it.” Nick started forming another apology, a snare, and Harry dug into a fistful of Nick’s shoulder to keep him in check. “Just say you can’t fucking look me in the eye. I’m not who you pictured, am I? This isn’t what you wanted. This isn’t what you’ve ever wanted.”

“You’re the _only_ ,” Nick said, as if that would be enough.

“You’re not clean either.”

“Harry, _listen_ , love—”

“Let me talk! Jesus Christ, you’re a mess. I thought I was a real piece of work but have you seen yourself?”

“You love me.”

“You pitched it to the press that I was a cocaine addict. Fanciful. Took me a while to get a hold of dad and explain that it was my shithead friend who’d _accidentally_ dropped a rumour. But as you know, he already had all sorts of ideas about me.”

“You trashed my car—”

Harry threw his hands in the air.

“You crashed my car into a lamppost,” Nick finished.

“Oh, fuck off. That’s not why. We’re not talking about revenge. I have plenty of other reasons for that.”

Nick dived after a shirt of any kind and struck his toes into a half-empty bottle of lube in the search. He cursed as it jittered across the floor and then nestled under the armoire. When his head popped out of the collar, Harry noted his sweat cooling under the ceiling fan, which puffed at his evasive eyebrows, now knitted.

“The thing is that your life was already spiralling when we got together. But you had no right to take me down with you. And you had never intended to settle down. It would have been nice to know. You’ve…” Harry felt something small and increasingly insistent biting inside him. It should have been release, but it felt like he was dying. “You’ve taken so much from me. These years, all I’ve been able to think about is what a horrible fucking person I am, but you brought me to that place.”

“I never used you. Your life got tangled completely on its own, distinctly without my help. Harry, sometimes I don’t know how to love you.”

“Let me take the plane.”

They stared at each other. Nick kept quiet, but his arms had come to cross his chest.

“You have no one,” Harry said. “Nothing of worth, and they’re all here because you’ve bribed them. As if any of this is for their sake. No matter what the fuck you’ll be doing when Matilda hits us, you’ll be alone. But I need to see my mother.”

“You’ll only see her to make sure she won’t turn over in her grave thinking about Gemma. It’s not a good cover-up. The plane is for your friend, the loose cannon. He made everyone uncomfortable when he was here.”

“Good thing we’re leaving then.”

Nick paraded past him to the armoire. He tore open the uppermost drawer and rifled through it, coming up with shells which he clicked in to the pistol in his other hand. Safe still on, he pressed it to Harry’s chest, partly wrapped in a clean, white hotel sock.

“Here you go, my treat. Do what you need to do and then you won’t need the goddamn plane anymore.” When Harry made no move to take it, Nick shouted, “You like guns, don’t you?”

Harry yanked it from his grasp and took to the door, where he had managed to hang at least one piece of clothing. The rest of his things lay at the foot of the door. Someone passed by in the hallway.

“You’ll be back,” Nick said. “There’s no way off this island. And there’s no place more eventful than this hotel when Matilda comes. I know that you’ve always wanted a scene.”

The barrel of the gun was clean, unused, but there had been more gun shells than the ones who fit in the pistol; Nick still held onto some of them.

“Why would you even have this?” Harry asked.

“Safety.”

Harry shook his head. “Wrong answer.”

Something nailed his body to the floorboards. Perhaps it was knowing that leaving would erase all his progress since his last plan went awry. Perhaps it was the yearning for something stable, that had made its presence known in toughened soles from dog-walking and a mind lulled by wine in front of the telly, blanket over his knees, shoulders, swathing his chin. Perhaps it was none of it – merely a grave void falling against the door by which he stood.

“Happy fortieth,” Harry said, before walking out.

***

The sea roared. It had been a quiet day, in Sylvester’s words, but towards sundown the water and mountains and seagulls preying for scraps of tourist meals at shore had become fiercer, as if they too sensed that time was running out. Fast food containers tumbled across the streets, which broadened the closer they came to the outskirts of town.

Most of the countdowns on radio had ceased, as had the hooligans who had been rumoured to have taken down the island’s local news station, so when Harry wished for something on his playlists, he was lucky to find a song he understood, and was even so always disappointed.

“I quite fancy this type of music,” Sylvester assured him, diverting his attention from the wide road as if to search for inhabitants. It felt as though there would be a way off the island, Harry reckoned, if all of these people they’d seen previous weeks no longer existed in playgrounds, in market squares or streets narrowed by pink and peach coloured houses. Off the face of the Earth.

He wanted to voice this thought when Sylvester furthered, “You know, fifties… sixties pop? Was it pop? Also, which decade was this? Anyway, my dad’s part of the family was always very into blues and soul, which is always pleasant, I suppose, but with my mum – when we were alone in the car, this is the sort of music she’d play me. The Platters, Connie Francis, Frankie Avalon. You know. That sort of old white people music she adored, for some reason.”

“I’d have nothing against silence,” Harry said.

“No, you need music more than me right now. You know, it’s time to find Lionel. Look at this.”

The Jeep slowed in front of the fenced runway. Sun still dappled the metal of the plane’s spine and wings, but clouds hailing from the mountains threatened to gobble up the light. Thick, smothering rain. As they made their way towards the plane by foot, Harry couldn’t help but imagine the pilot that had lived up there, and the pistol he’d tucked against between his skin and shorts seared while Lionel ended the man’s life within seconds.

“People are bunkering up,” Harry guessed. This close, he caressed the flank of the plane, moving along. Ahead. “Have you wondered what’s happened to the islanders?”

“Nah.” Sylvester mimicked his stroke. “I mean, we – me, Collette and some others,” he explained, “—went to this bar out east, but most of the booze was out as the greater part of the area was deserted. You know what it’s like east.” Harry did not. “I entered the cellar to see if they had anything stashed in there, but the door was locked from inside. Was markings on the wall, this crossed-out circle. And I’ve seen those markings around the island, don’t know if you have.”

“Cult?” Harry asked.

“Plenty of members.”

Harry came upon a flaw in the metal. From there, it wasn’t exactly a plane anymore. It had the exterior of knowing it was about to take flight, without recognising the mass of wires and electronical knicks and knacks at its feet and the ones still clinging on to the metal frame. Much like at the fence around the runway, candy wrappers and plastic bags with once-was groceries and meaningless junk had tumbled in the wind to the plane and now wiggled in its wheels, never to fall away thousands of feet in the sky.

Sylvester eventually came around to his side of the vehicle and together they surveyed the sabotage. As was later pointed out, even a pair of pliers rested among the trapped debris, but Harry didn’t notice those now.

“Nick,” Harry said just as Sylvester said, “Lionel.”

“I have no idea where he is,” Sylvester said.

“We’re supposed to take him back on this plane tonight.”

“It _is_ tonight.” The statement might have seemed more realistic, hadn’t the heat been rolling off the ground in molasses like mirages, nailing their clothes to their skin as the sun had only begun lapping at the ocean to test its boundaries.

“Tomorrow is August twelfth. The world is ending in ten damned days but we’ll be dead by morning.”

“You’re screaming. Don’t scream right now.”

With shaky knees, Harry made his way back to the car and dropped to a heightened slab of concrete that might have once been a pavement. Sylvester joined him and wiped sweat from his brow while Harry felt some chuting across his upper lip, singeing irritated skin. Whichever cologne Nick had left on him was dripping away by the second.

“Nick told me there wasn’t a way off this island. And now there isn’t.”

“Then we’ll go scouting for planes tonight. And pilots. Or boats. There are still a few hours at our disposal.” Sylvester rested his elbows on his knees, hands clasped and chin proud. “Is that why we left?”

Harry rested his gaze on the carnage of the plane. From this angle, its spilled guts glimmered in the forthcoming sundown. “No. He said… Fuck, he’s such a cunt. He talked badly about my sister. I realised why it never worked out between us in the first place, so I 

didn’t see any reason to stay. It wasn’t ever my plan to spend the rest of my life on this island. I want to go home to mum. I want to see her, apologise. To come home.”

“She’d be happy to see you. Your mum.”

“You don’t know what I did.”

“You killed your sister.”

The way he said it was if he had known and come to terms with it since the day they had lain eyes on each other on that marble bench in a forgotten Las Vegas casino. The way he said it was with the same timbre he would have pointed out untied shoelaces or clouds brewing on a scorching day in June after intermittent rains.

“He told everyone,” Harry said, gaze fleeting towards the city, embedded in burned-out fields and no longer inhabited homes in a spectre of colour. “Why would he tell everyone?”

Sylvester pondered the information, one cheek sucked into his mouth as he gnawed it with thoughts far away, before saying, “I’m sorry we made the deal about Lionel.”

Harry laughed. It was so sudden that it cut his throat, the rarity of it, as if the muscles in and around his neck had been designed for mourning and was now uncovering a new meaning. As sudden as it was, it was short, but it gave him a taste for more. He said, “You willingly flew down here with two hitmen, without asking any questions, and just chilled. Even with knowing what you know. You’re incredible, Olsson.”

“Should we seek him out or just hope he doesn’t find us?” Sylvester still sounded and looked as if the laughter had knocked the wind out of him.

“What do you think?”

“That we go back to the motel and have a drink. Plan a route maybe. Find a mechanic to fix this one up.” And he gestured towards the plane.

“Even then we’d have to find someone capable of flying it.” Harry could tell Sylvester was spinning the web further in his head, so he said, “She called me one evening. It had become her idea to be ‘assassinated by a celebrity’, and I think we both felt as if we did some good. She laid most of the groundwork and I followed her lead. Always the better one with a gun, and she had most of the brains as well, but in practise I’d have to actually pull the trigger. I’ve told you about this.”

Sylvester nodded. His hands had fallen limp, elbows still rested on his bare knees.

Gemma had called him that evening. It was on the cusp of spring, and Harry remembered the mud, because there had been a long time of drought, but when he drove to her house he hadn’t been able to see fifty feet in front of him. All of the windshield had been mud and water and snapped branches and squashed insects washed away. He still had the taste of chocolates his mum had bought him for his birthday. When he arrived, it was as if she had held herself together by an inch that crumbled as soon as the floorboards creaked under his dirty shoes. Traffic had been scarce, so he’d been able to make the trip in less than twenty minutes, but he never got out of there as fast.

Harry fell back on the concrete, arms spread over his head and eyes closed. His pits breathed for the first time in what felt like weeks, though it couldn’t have been longer than a couple of hours. Life seemed to bend and stretch in a strange way when the matter of time was on the table.

He said, “It’s the gravest mistake of my life. She called me that evening because she didn’t want to live anymore. More scared than I’ve ever seen a person. What’s odd about

being hired, as a hitman ‘celebrity’, is that you rarely get any tears. At least no tears concerning death. Mostly it’s about wasted opportunities or questionable life choices, but never about just dying. But she couldn’t bear the thought of not growing old. She wanted it to be on her terms.”

When he came to think of it, she might have been drinking tea when he came to her. Or beer. But hadn’t it been a tea cup? He’d been drinking afterwards, having left his heart on the kitchen floor with hers. But the heart was a glass that never filled up. It had been a worse drinker than he’d ever been.

“Then I met you and Lionel in Vegas,” he said. “I despise myself. All that matters is that mum—”

Harry breathed. It was all he could do. And while he did, the sun was setting and the birds swept in the from the ocean to nest on the fence around the airplane or in the maws of roofs on adjacent houses.

“I want nothing else but to talk to her again. I don’t want— Fuck Nick. I don’t want to die without having seen her again. I’m so scared of dying.”

“When the three of us were talking about dumb ways for the Earth to end,” Sylvester said, and all Harry sensed, with his eyes closed, was Sylvester’s gentle timbre, steadfast unlike his own. “Back then, among asteroids and plagues and zombies and whatnot, I never realised what I was truly afraid of. I supposed I didn’t want to die alone, but that’s not something I fear.”

“Are you one of those cynics who believe we all die alone, no matter?”

“No. Well, maybe I do now.” And he laughed, no louder than a sigh, nor longer. “Dying isn’t the point, is all I want to say. It’ll suck. Shit, it’ll suck so damn much. But what scares me the most is the realisation that everything and everyone else will die with us. And they expected us to have three months to get our lives and dreams and goals straight. _Of course_ people are becoming heroinists and hitmen and speeding and high-jacking radio channels.

“There will be nothing to remember us by, yeah, but there won’t be anyone who will ever have a drink after a long day of work in the arms of someone they love, and there won’t be anyone to experience love after we’re gone. Nor will there be any lawns to mow, or rivers to sit by. No one to laugh at a bad pun, no one to cook dinner for their family. I think a lot about how everyone sees the end coming, but no one can stop it.”

“You can only take it into your own hands.”

Sylvester nodded in the gap between Harry’s loose lids.

“Amen,” Harry said. “You’ve made me depressed but… Amen.”

“Let’s have that last drink, then. Find Lionel. I don’t want to live with this fear anymore, and you’ve lived with it far longer than I have.”

A hand fell down towards him. He took it, let himself be lifted up, up, up, until his soles melted to the damp leather of his worn shoes and bits of gravel and sand drilled into it from below. The breeze was easing up, leaving them in a humid summer evening that was certainly not uncommon, but still a dying breed. Together they walked towards the car.


	13. You don't fare well

**7 DAYS LEFT, AUGUST 14th, you don’t fare well**

Harry was afraid of the dark. Of not seeing a sunrise to the eternal night falling on the clavicles of the ocean. Of never waking up from the news they had shared on the radio, of a peculiar asteroid, seventy miles wide, hurrying towards Earth, as if it couldn’t visit soon enough. Of answering the phone, occasionally, but more commonly of dreaming and finding himself at home where family pictures lined the hallway walls and fireplace nook, gathering dust or catching fire from the roaring flames.

Oftentimes, when he didn’t see his sister directly, he watched her silhouette in the fire veiling their house, lumping over curtains and their lawn alongside branches of the old fir. The smell of firewood clouded his judgement upon waking, and the slick heat of the Mediterranean puckered his skin as a warning that the scenario wasn’t all too distant.

When they had turned on the radio, a presenter had announced that there had been a few miscalculations in Matilda’s positioning, meaning that she wouldn’t visit in a week. Rather, the time span had been narrowed to sixteen hours and twenty-six minutes. They were nearly on the fifteenth hour now.

Harry was still afraid of the dark.

Now, where he surveyed the horizon from a rooftop in town, Sylvester rested on a three times folded handmade rug matching the paled facades of houses around and Harry felt nothing. A much more frightening thought occurred as he was able to place the emotion, and it was that he hadn’t felt it coming over him. He was impossibly familiar with the void that opened its arms, but less so with this one – the one that doesn’t demand anything, where you forget to feel.

He attempted restraining it once it had overcome him, but there were no children left in the street and no street food – what was left was found in the dirt, if it hadn’t already been munched on by wild animals – and he couldn’t find peace in the inanimate structures around him.

“It won’t end in darkness,” Sylvester promised. He kept an arm thrown over his eyes, which Harry supposed he found ironic, somewhere in the back of his head.

“It still will,” Harry professed. “Just, it’ll be bright before then. Before the dark comes.”

“This blows. You think you know how much time you have left. Finally.

“He was so calm. On the radio. As if he’d known long enough to stomach the news.”

“Don’t buy into conspiracies, man. What’s it give, you know?”

“What does anything give anymore?”

It was quiet, for a while, before Sylvester sighed and got up from the rug. He unfolded it once and let it fall next to Harry and sat. The scent of sizzling asphalt and cigarette smoke gripped them, but Harry couldn’t see anyone below. They heard a bang somewhere in the clutter of buildings, like metal containers being collided with.

“One week early,” Harry said.

“It’s like it never mattered. Time, you know. At first, there wasn’t even an asteroid, and even when it’s coming towards us they’re not sure when it’ll be here.”

“Maybe she won’t come at all.”

“I wanna be high. Not hype on scouting for drugs, though.”

“Can we listen to the announcement again?”

Sylvester scoffed at him and got on his feet. With his shoulder swerving towards Harry as he turned away, Sylvester halted and shielded the sun from his eyes. He gazed across the rooftops.

When Harry looked back out, he too could see a figure blackened by sunlight strolling towards them. Most features melted off in the light, but the tip of a small nose curled up from the defiant head, childlike compared to the slope of his body when walking, where knees jutted a bit too far over his toes and one foot dragged behind now and then. His threadbare vacation shirt was tied around his head in a similar fashion to the bandana Harry had caught himself wearing during his first weeks on the island.

Lionel’s muscles became more prominent now that his skin was tauter, but they too looked washed-out, as if they were a washcloth twisted dry. The grizzle he’d amounted on his chest and chin didn’t either. Although, given his young age, Harry reckoned the colour came from the dust blowing on the streets, or the sea.

He didn’t sit down, once he’d made his way onto the roof. He stood by their side, regarding them with glassy eyes. Sylvester didn’t seem to mind, didn’t tighten or shy, and Harry found himself indifferent to the new presence. Rain soothed the lands north of the horizon. It couldn’t be smelled or heard yet, but it was approaching.

“Where’s the gun?” Lionel asked.

He sounded like himself, even if he didn’t look the part.

“The Mandela Wellness Resort,” Harry said.

“You’re not up here to play cards.”

“We were looking for you. For a while. There aren’t a lot of gambling dens left.”

“Not that you know of.”

Lionel sunk down.

“You know,” he said. “Sylvester was a decent gambler, back when we met. Not so much now. But you were always shit from the start.”

“Thanks,” Sylvester said, whereas Harry objected, “Because I wasn’t there to gamble.”

Lionel smiled, and when he did his lips only curled back an inch over themselves, still shielding teeth, but baring the softer skin on his mouth, the parts that had only been restlessly gnawed by teeth. He leaned back on his palms, drinking in the sun.

“I’m pretty shit myself. Haven’t won anything permanently on this island.”

“I won a karaoke competition,” Sylvester said, which caused Harry to perk his ears. “At the Blue Lounge. They’d been eating their way through the decades so I came right before rock ruined the seventies.”

Harry averted his attention back to Lionel. “Maybe you’ve just been bamboozled.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Sylvester touched his nose ring.

“Considering everything,” he said, “I ought to say I’m good. I’m satisfied.”

“And I say we celebrate with a drink. One thing’s certain and it’s that I won’t be sober tonight. Or tomorrow.”

“The Blue Lounge?” Sylvester said.

“Sure,” Harry said. “Give it another week and we’ll be regulars.”

***

As it happened, the Blue Lounge had shut down. Or rather, it had been forced, Harry suspected. Windows reflected the turbulent skies rather than the trio stopping to stare at the spilled glasses of beer still balancing on the bar disk and the torn leather of the stools around. Vibrant pearls that had hung next to the menu had scattered over the floor whereas some had retained their dignity in the glassless window frames. A putrid smell reminiscent of fireworks or marshmallows over an open fire signalled for the trio to be on their way.

More and more people showed up the farther into the core of town they journeyed. They hung out of flats and played games in the streets and cheered or contemplated on a bench or beneath a cypress in a square crowded by pigeons and old plastic fast food packages. Amidst the scene appeared a bar of which the sign had become one with the debris scooted against any available wall.

They shimmied through the thick of costumers to a table. Its edges hadn’t been varnished in years and time and vandals had weathered the wood into something similar of a ship’s wheel with its handles chopped off. While Sylvester ordered them drinks, careful not to lose himself to the drunk mass, Harry found himself being eyed by Lionel as he nudged a dully shimmering path of old liquor down the table top.

“Are you going to shoot this place up?” he asked.

Lionel, with his hands knotted, slumped further over the table when the room shrunk, and remained leaned in to Harry’s sphere even as the new trough of men had passed by.

“I don’t have a gun,” Lionel answered. “Do you?”

“No gun, no car – nowhere to go and I’m not drunk enough to feel good about it.”

“Man.” Sylvester returned and dumped the glasses between them, tossing out new pools across the wood. Lionel rose up to drink, before asking, “What happened to the Jeep? I loved that thing.”

Before them stood two shots each, and Sylvester had somehow also managed two thirds of a pint to the table. The third share had sloshed over the lip of the glass.

Sylvester knocked one back. “Broke down. Apparently, it needs gas to work and someone’d stolen all of ours when we got back to it.”

“And the motel?”

“Folks from the Mandela took over.”

“Oh, that fucking drama.”

Harry peered up as Lionel downed his as well. As a hand reached for the two thirds of action-packed lager, Harry seized the handle of the pint.

“They’re the reason you’re not getting back to your family. Call that ‘fucking drama’ if you will,” he said. He sucked the foam up through pursed lips, then dragged a rigid thumb across his mouth to catch the remains, let it hang in the crease of his faint laughter lines in thought. “Well, also you shot the only pilot we could find.”

Sylvester made grabby-hands towards the lager. Harry drank it instead.

Lionel said, “I’ve made peace with that. Have you?”

Harry dumped the glass. Sylvester salvaged it from his grip before it could shatter. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Lionel.” His eyelids fluttered. “Amelia.”

“Jesus! Are you mad that I shot her or that I slept with her?”

“Is that a question?”

“The same rules don’t apply as before. Not when the sky is burning. We know that. Do you remember telling me about your sister?”

Harry’s mind warped to a dark place. His eyes flickered to Sylvester who sipped, barely present. “

“You were high as can be and just— It was probably a rough night for you, but Sylvester went to the bathroom, and there you were, yapping. Aren’t you glad I took the gun from you?”

“Aren’t you glad I haven’t shot you yet?”

“As if you’d be able to, son.”

“Fellas,” Sylvester said. He still had his eyes trained on something in a parallel universe. “We ought to go to the resort.”

“We oughtn’t,” Harry decided.

Lionel appeared amused.

“You’ve clearly still got issues to work out,” Sylvester told Harry, then turned to Lionel, “And, so, I still like you, bro, but you’re a psychopath, and I just won’t be in this hovel until you both get your shit together. So, we should go.”

For a few moments, there was nothing but the breeze of conversation about the room.

Sylvester sighed. “It’s unbelievable that I have to parent you two. I’m twenty-fucking-four.”

“Right, I forget,” Lionel said. His demeanour paused, much alike that of an old man storing away the memories of the past day in his mind palace. Then his head slanted, his chin rose then sunk, and he looked at Harry. “Are you ready to make something out of this night?”

Harry gestured for the last of the lager and hid his pondering in profuse honey-yellow. He thought of his mother. He saw her mowed to the ground by an enormous asteroid and his childhood home shattering. It didn’t make sense, he thought. They hadn’t lived there in years. But when he thought of her, she was in their old kitchen, brewing tea with Gemma.

He grabbed the edge of the table, steadied his breath, or sparked it, and decided, “All right. Fuck it.”

“The rest of the world is on me!” Sylvester exclaimed. Only Harry and Lionel heard him.

***

It wouldn’t be a proper end of the world if no one played Jorja Smith, at least not if Nick was to decide. A wonderland of sin and festivity bursted before them, all voiced by disparate choruses, water exploding in the pool and plates breaking. In true college spirit, some had already passed on the stairwell, and Harry’s head rang.

Lionel had snuck off to somewhere upstairs, where the party kept going – there oughtn’t be a quiet place within the resort’s perimeters – and Sylvester lounged by Harry’s side, neutral. Kings of Leon started playing, and the atmosphere beckoned for someone to crusade across the hall with their limbs meandered in the chandelier, but the chaos hadn’t even started. The glimpses Harry had caught of the shopping lists and calendar promised festivities without consequences, and the longer he stood in the atmosphere, the more he synced with the guests’ immortality.

“Do you want to check on Lionel?” Harry asked, mouth lax, gaze frozen. Far off, in the ballroom-turned-dining hall, Nick looked back at him, clothes in disarray and a glass of grape juice or absinthe or detergent in hand. Harry couldn’t read him.

“Nah,” Sylvester said. “I’m good.” He then mistook Harry’s silence for disagreement. “What’s he gonna do? Ain’t no plane around, no phones, nothing to truly aggravate him. Honestly, he might just be fine. I don’t know what’s up with him, but this might be the one time he’s actually fine.”

Nick softened his eyes and guided them back to his audience, hoisted the glass and spoke something that was apparently audible over the drums and chorus of voices. Cheers erupted in response. Another track came on. Harry couldn’t place the singer.

“Sounds good,” he said. His hand took Sylvester’s shoulder, after patting at his shoulder blade and neck. “It’s pretty muggy in here, I’m heading outside.”

Sylvester might’ve protested behind him, but Harry had already swept forward. Adrenaline and bits of genuine calculation ignited his brain. In the muddle, gazes fell on him in the ballroom, someone hollered the name of an old song of his and another couple of performers belted out the lyrics. Others shifted out of his way in silence, perhaps intimidated by his pointy noir dress shoes, dusty but still of lux make, or the knots of his eyebrows above sizzling eyes.

Ahead of him, Nick had slipped out onto the patio and now boasted his drink of whatever in his palm as he sunk down next to someone on a lounger. Outside was also, along with another chunk of guests, an ice sculpture of James Franco, live size.

“Fucking hell,” Harry said.

Nick looked over towards him.

“Oh, welcome,” Nick said. The other person – Harry couldn’t place her. Model? Performer? Radio host? – fastened a cloth around his bicep, so Nick shifted the glass to his other hand. He blinked away a wince from the force. “Did _not_ think you’d show up here.”

“What are you drinking?”

Nick examined the drink. “It’s obviously champagne. What else would I be playing at.”

Having had a sudden change of heart, he disengaged from the cloth. In a fluent motion, the woman rewound it around herself and shook out a needle from her robe. Nick got up and wandered off farther, greeting people as he went. They aimed for the shed over by the massive fencing around the perimeter.

Harry hung in his steps. “Have you taken anything?”

“Yep.”

“I went to see the plane. Was completely torn open with chunks—”

Nick pressed the champagne into Harry’s hand. “You want to try this.” Then he opened the garden shed and flicked on a deficient light. Had it been an hour later into darkness, or had there been a few more drinks at the place next to the Blue Lounge, Harry wouldn’t have been able to see the arsenal of handguns stuffed between lighter fluid and sacks of charcoal and the occasional cracked flower pot inside.

He blinked. “There’s no one left on this island that might be of any threat to you! You’re obsessed with protecting this place but it’s really just shite. And soon it’ll be wiped out anyway.”

Nick switched back his champagne for one of the guns. Something about it was off. It didn’t feel right in Harry’s hand.

As he pondered, Nick drew the barrel of it to his forehead, and softly gazed up at Harry.

“Feels weird, doesn’t it? The gun. Try it.”

When attempting to pull away, Nick firmed his grip on the weapon.

“Coward,” he said. Harry couldn’t tell if it was a sneer or a jest.

He kept the gun still against Nick, but his hand slackened.

“You’re such a fucking dickhead.”

“Right,” Nick said. He pulled the trigger.

Harry tore his hand from the gun and walked off only to circle back shortly after. “You have an entire shed of toy guns.” Nick tossed it into the air and caught it repeatedly, as if in awe of gravity. There was barely any liquid left in his glass. “And James Franco in ice. A quarter of the world’s remaining population are sprawling across the resort.”

“And you’re still furious at me.”

Under the overhanging branches of orange trees beyond the fencing, Nick had sat down on a rock and tried to shoot himself for the umpteenth time. His flicking stopped, however, when Harry stopped pacing.

“I’m going to get Lionel,” Harry said. “Then I’ll leave.”

“Because there are so many grander places where you have to be?”

“No, it’s because you’re a cunt, and I’m thinking about swimming towards the horizon until either my lungs give out or Matilda explodes the ocean in fire and pressure and I combust.”

Nick was quiet for a second before saying, “Nonsense.”

But Harry turned on his heel. Insects webbed the lanterns strewn across the wall of the resort, which he first sought comfort in, then hurried away from. The grease and hysteria inside diluted for a second in the opened double doors, before squeezing him.

“Harry,” Nick sounded behind him. Then, distantly, “You’re realising you’re also being very cunty right now.”

 _It’s my goddamn right_. Junk littered the marble staircase, which Nick seemed to traipse around with his bare feet, but Harry pushed forward.

“Fine. You have the right to be petty. So do I. But all I want is for you to be here right now – preferably without spitting in my face.”

All corridors upstairs had the same numbered doors and carpets, albeit some of them had scored burns and vomit to distinguish.

“I know you think everyone is here for me or something, but they just all want an easy out. It’s hard to say no when everyone you know will be at this one place. Three fifths of these people, I’ve no idea who they are.”

“And that makes it better?”

“You’re _unjustly_ cunty tonight.”

“Guess I’m the only one who still gives a damn about my family.”

A hand whipped him around and he came face to face with once-voluptuous hair flattened by distress and humidity.

“My family is here,” Nick said. “I may not have had a heart to heart with everyone here, but don't victimise yourself. We're all victimised.”

Someone ran past them in their full birthday suit, garlands tangled around neck and arms and chased by a similar figure.

“No one’s getting out of this alive.”

“I know! But that didn’t give you the right to take away my options. It’s my death. Along with the rest, but fuck, Nick. It was mine.”

The right door came along. Barely shut, it showcased Lionel and a room Harry had grown familiar with, as his clothes had once dappled its floors and bedposts. Now like any other time, the room was in feng shui distress. Lionel stood in the middle as if he’d exploded and left a buffer zone between himself and the mess, scratching his head.

“If you want to come with, I’m leaving now,” Harry told his vacant gaze. “If not, I bet there’s plenty of coke downstairs.”

“Upstairs…” Nick trailed off.

Magazines that might have been from the last batch on the island showed between the linen shirts and they spoke of the Pope’s seven-step plan to salvation and the ongoing arms race between North Korea and the US, now peaking at extreme levels with the involvement of Russia, China and the UK. Most disturbing, though, was the toe jutting out of Lionel’s sock.

Harry scowled. “Mate, where are your socks?”

Lionel appeared to have heard him, albeit from far away, because he lifted his head from the trash circle. His sock did not appear to lie in it.

“Stay as long as you’d like,” Nick said. “Place’s immense. I’m sure you’ll find a spot. Excuse me.”

When Harry turned around, he was gone. His footsteps couldn’t be heard over the music. Harry pushed the door closed and leaned back against it, hands still against the wood, then running down his face. His head felt like a million voices. And he was unfathomably tired.

“They might drop a nuclear bomb,” Lionel said. He might as well have spoken from across the Atlantic.

Harry fell away from the door and picked his way across the room, through the circle. Mirror shards reflected his sunken eyes, matching Lionel’s, even though only one of them had smoked their life away during the past week. The standing mirror in the corner of the room, partially veiled by curtain and roaring waves, lacked a click of glass in the corner. Harry stared at it for a long time.

“I fucking miss Vegas,” he said. “Can imagine how things would have panned out in Vegas.”

Lionel said nothing, so Harry told him. “Pools of coins, for one. Massive riots and scavengers from all across the nation flooding to and from, maybe trying to catch a ticket to another continent. But I imagine, chaotic as it was, it might have been a place of solitude. I’d quite fancy meeting Matilda in the desert.”

“Wouldn’t you like it in any place as long as it wasn’t here?” Lionel asked, to which Harry thought _introspective_ but said nothing of.

“The desert sun can be overwhelming,” he admitted. “But I’m terrified of the dark. Anything’s better than that. Any goddamn other time zone.”

Lionel said his name and Harry lifted his head. A weight glimmered in Lionel’s hand.

“Yeah, I know,” Harry said. “Saw it when I left.”

After regarding the piece for a moment, Lionel switched the safe off and aimed it towards the mirror before thinking otherwise and rearing it towards the balcony doors.

“Bullets are in the drawer,” Harry said, unbuttoning the top of his stress-damp shirt.

Lionel fired a hole through the glass door. Shards whirled around them and onto the rocks below the balcony and exploded through the lazy curtains that could no longer veil the terror the bullet had torn in the scene. A small moan came from Lionel as something slighted his ankle and blood funnelled the carpet. The sounds whipped through Harry’s head, slowly centralising in a singular hum as his hands unclenched from the bedsheets and Lionel snorted in suppressed laughter as he lowered his aim.

“Bullets actually might be in the drawer,” Lionel said in an afterthought and sought out the location.

Harry undid another button of his stress-wet shirt. Whatever hair had fallen onto his eyes, he flicked away.

“Bullets are!” Lionel announced, picked some clothes out and yanked the drawer out to flip it upside down. Bullets clicked out on the floor until they dominated the space. He finished, “In the drawer. And in the kitchen as well. Jesus, went for a wee nacho snack and got a fistful of soft-noses.”

“I don’t say _wee_. I’ve never said _wee_ ,” Harry muttered. “Are you out of your mind?”

Lionel sank down next to him. The blood barely crowned his skin. He wiped it off with a caring thumb. “Am I on my way to gun down five hundred people in this fancy-ass, albeit slightly run-down, resort? I’m likely not.”

“No one is.”

“Harry, pal.” And Lionel edged out a sliver of glass from his flesh with a _humpf_. “Think of me as whichever kind of fifth-level sociopath you want—”

“Psychopath, if anything,” Harry cut in.

“—But Nick’s about to poop this entire party and y’all know it. Or, you do now because I’m telling you.”

A crowded ballroom, capsized boats and tempered-with planes.

“Why did you kill your sister?”

A narrow garden shed chock-full of arms. Harry said, “Oh…”

“Need you to talk to me, Styles, so you’ll listen to the actual issue. Why did you kill her?”

“Because she asked me to, Lionel.”

“And why did she do that?”

“She was afraid.”

“We’re all damn afraid. Why?”

Harry’s limbs were on the run – hands flailing, shoulders jerking, a massive _I don’t know_. “She was afraid of the world ending. She didn’t want to die.”

“If she asked you to do it, she must have had a grand motive.”

Five hundred people on an island without means to leave. Afraid of the dark.

Harry held his collar, cool with sweat. “No one wants to die alone, do they?”

“So badly they ask their brother to do it for them? Or blow up a party?” Lionel quieted. “ _Blow up_. The hell didn’t that occur to me earlier? Excellent.”

“Christ.” Harry sighed, and his chin fell to his chest. He viewed the room through the mirror shards on the floor; sprinkles of blood, torn leaves in the lush potted plant by the armoire, which drawers sloped and were laden with clothes, and he watched the bullets strewn between shards and socks on a carpet handmade in local taste. “

“So, apropos…” Lionel cusped.

“I ought to stop him, don’t I?” Harry asked. “But… It’s possible that they’re all in on it.”

“Unlikely.” Lionel had resorted to picking his nails, gun jutting from his fist. “But what do I know. People are strange. One hell of an ex you’ve got there.” He dropped his hands, Harry spotted in the corner of his eye, and when he gazed up, Lionel wore the same dejected look as he.

“Fuck,” Harry said.

“Language.”

“I have to talk to him.”

“It’s like, what?” Lionel’s head lolled in search of something in the room. “Six hours left?

“More like eight. Or seven. Stay optimistic.”

“Sure fucking thing,” Lionel said. He looked as if he wanted to do a line.

“Language.”

Lionel hoisted the gun. “Cheers. Talking’s not worth anything. Don’t take the man’s last dying wish away from him.”

“It’s my dying right to decide how I go out…” He quieted. “What’s your surname?”

“Smith. Anderson. Martin.”

Harry blanked.

Lionel leaned back on the bed. “I’m whatever you want me to be, baby.”

Treading over the mine field, Harry made his way to the door. Before leaving, he beckoned the gun from Smith-Anderson-Martin. Lionel rejected his request.

“I’ll fix this,” Harry said. “And I don’t think that’s his final wish. I just reckon he’s afraid of being alone, of not having amounted to anything. Whichever. I know I am.”

“I’m not!” Lionel fell onto the bed, arms angel-wide and gun light in his hand. He looked more youthful than he had in a while. “Tell Olsson I wish…” He snorted. “Nah. Offer him a drink for me.”

“Come downstairs later? Once we’re not certain to get blown up.”

“Probably not.” And after him, through the hallway came Lionel’s cry, “Don’t wait up for me!” Then came the gunshot.

Harry froze in his steps just as a pair of crossdressers ambled past him, past the door to Nick’s room without a second glance in their joyous haze. A heel gave and one had to catch the other, cackling hoarsely in a way that suggested not only too many a drink, but a straw of one too many night belting out lyrics through a cold. Perhaps also a bout of the cigars Nick had amassed downstairs.


	14. Matilda

**5 HOURS LEFT, AUGUST 15th, Matilda**

“You’ve got some sauce on your blouse,” the woman said, but vanished in thick strobes before Harry could think anything. His afterthought was this: he wore a blouse bloodstained from Lionel’s ricocheting shot, and, why hadn’t he taken part of any free food since arriving? Strobes and widespread candlelight in an all-white ballroom didn’t make for a good combination in any direction, Harry also reflected upon. It was too bright to trick yourself you were wasting away in any London club or to overlook the groupings gathered. It was too dim to pretend as though you were in a restaurant where they served tiny hors d’œuvres to die for and it was too white to imagine yourself in someone’s living room quaintly dusted in furniture mismatched in texture and style and light from a sundown through wry blinds.

He stood drunkenly in the doorway, the support of his arm high on the doorframe by his head as if he might overturn or coat the marbled dulled by masses of shoe scratches in the salsa he’d had for lunch. Or, what little he had managed to stomach. His gaze also fell to his dress shoes, breezily sliced by the exploding mirror. To eat, he reckoned.

To find Nick.

Hunger won, and Harry aimed for the kitchen. They must’ve raided a delivery truck on its way to the nearest supermarket, or simply raided the supermarket, for everywhere stood some kind of vessel with food. Sunflower and pumpkin seeds had been stuffed in glasses, an array of sauces and gallimaufries in black red-tinted ceramic bowls could be found atop counters and kitchen fans, a casserole massacred by utensils peered from an oven and whiskeys and gins and wines and the island’s own makes towered between dish and people who found the kitchen to be a better lounge than the actual lounge.

Harry received a plate from someone and took a lap around the room assembling various gastronomical experiences. He shied from an iced bucket of shellfish – people stood elsewhere in the room for a reason, the fans had since long shut down and the open windows did little to help as smokers used up the air they offered – and circled back out in the ballroom.

He ate solemnly in the corner of the room as the scene played out in fast-forward. To find Nick, he reckoned. Instead he slalomed through bodies and glanced onto the patio and pool and garden shed, once again locked up. He didn’t stay there for long, turned off by the smell of chlorine, somehow lingering despite everything else ceasing during these last hours. Turning back, he discovered the stage, somehow left out during his brief overlook.

Unlike the rest of the venue, the stage hadn’t amassed any greatness. A naked mic-stand arose with some sort of baroque armchair behind it and a Gibson placed on an unremarkable stand. Improbable, but upon a closer look, Harry recognised a scratch on its back body from when it had wounded up on Mitch’s head after a night in Glasgow. The first tour.

“Guests and self-invitees!” someone announced behind him; a clinking of glass quieted most of the room now that the music had died. Nick’s eyes briefly swept across the ballroom before burning into Harry’s back – they must’ve, for heat ran up Harry’s spine – and he said, “As much spontaneity we’ve had and will have here tonight, there’s one thing I’d like for all of us to listen to. As most of you know and adore him, and hopefully me, this won’t be much of an inconvenience, and if it is, the hotel is large. Quite massive. You’ll find something to do.”

Harry faced the rest of the room to guests seeping back into the ballroom. There was barely space to breathe, except for right in front of the stage, where Nick stood by himself. With shirt unbuttoned and tie loose around his neck, nursing a mango rather than champagne, he looked surprisingly sober. Onstage, in the midst of this speech, there was little escape.

“Harry Styles,” Nick said, less town-crier now and less radio host, “Famous to some in here. To others, quite the company and a doable chef. To some, simply an enjoyable person. Ever since the idea of this whole event had sparked in my head, I knew it couldn’t be done without you here in some form. Perhaps, afterwards, I might say a few things to you before we all part for good. But it would be me a great honour if you’d play tonight.”

Harry hadn’t noticed the spotlights until now. They’d crept up on him until his every crevice swam in sparkles and more than surely his blood- and sweat-spattered blouse was surveyed by hundreds of people. No one seemed to care much for the taints. Neither did he, he discovered. On the other hand, his attention flooded to the narrow maple neck slickening at his touch, light scourging core to apex of the body’s skeletal stalk, the intention in Nick’s gaze, even if his comportment didn’t keep up.

“I just ate,” Harry said. His voice didn’t reach far beyond the stage. Someone yelled for him to speak into the microphone.

He approached, guitar barely in his clutch. “Obviously,” he began, “It’s been a while since I’ve stood in front of an audience this drunk and acquainted.” Impromptu cheers from a corner. A follow-up of quaked applause. Nick’s smile. “If I may steal your attention for a few minutes, I think it’s only fair I honour Nick’s request. Who are here at his invitation tonight?”

The cheers re-arose in full strength. Someone snored face-down on the main table.

Nick grew more interested, it seemed.

Harry said something else, but later that morning he couldn’t remember his exact words, and then he played. He remembered playing. He recalled Nick working the room and their mutual friends urging on a sing-along and he recalled the smell of something burnt and a squad of guests entering the kitchen and candlelight being burked and he recalled bliss from being adored, being swallowed by this crowd. He couldn’t remember Nick disappearing, but one blink passed and he had vanished from the room, his silhouette floating from the patio double doors. George, close to the stage, seized the moment and overtook the stage with his old bandmates, and Harry escaped to no one’s disappointment or joy. Out of sight.

He caught up with Nick’s figure down on the beach. They’d come to the point where on one hand, waves frolicked across feet and shoes and toes printed the soft sands, or everything drowned in the ceasing moonlight. For once, Harry feared a sunrise, as there wouldn’t be a sun to speak of.

Nick didn’t attempt to flee him. He stood with wide shoulders, wind stirring in his hair.

“I just didn’t think you would play,” he said. His hands were pocketed, his chin shaven. Harry thought of his own untrimmed face and the blood. Lionel. Not of whichever fields and sunsets and hard-ons and fountains of booze seemed to brim from Nick. They wanted to grab a hold of him.

The moment Nick realised Harry didn’t exist in the same vacuum as him, the gleam fell from his eyes. Harry was overcome with fear, only kept at bay previously by mutual interest, the question of what the next move was supposed to be.

Harry ought to ask something. Then Nick opened his mouth and out came, “Whose blood is that?”

In that moment, the slit on Harry’s ankle seared. He said, “I know the _what_. I just don’t think I know the _why_. You’ve gathered hundreds of guns and propped bullets into socks and pretty much everyone you’ve ever known and cut off every way of transportation off this island. Sure,” Harry said, and this with an empty snort, “You’ve made it all nice. Not as grand as it could’ve been, but who’s to say? You did good. I wouldn’t have managed half as well, is what I want to say.”

“What’s hard to understand?” Nick asked.

“I guess nothing.”

“Then you know that I have to. Now, anyway. If I don’t follow through today, I’ll have dragged everyone out here for nothing, ruined everyone’s plans for the last weeks. I’m a fraud, but if I follow through, there’ll have been a purpose. As a hitman, surely you’ll agree with me that we shoot to kill, not wound.”

Harry didn’t want to edge closer. Nick’s attire bore no weapons, but he didn’t want to take a chance. He thought of how Nick had separated Aimee and Ian from their kids. Pixie was pregnant. His mum was home alone.

As Nick sighed, the crown of his head fell towards the horizon and his chin rose upwards. “There’s a landline that might still work. I’ve been using it to call my mum and the others before the second flight came over. It’s not on the resort, but you could bring your friends with you if you want. It’s just a short drive away.”

Up by the resort, lights flared wildly, perhaps from a fire in old recliners and garden utensils; the air smelled watery, lightly of foreign wood ablaze.

“It’s late for a landline. It’ll never manage. You’ve split up so many families through this endeavour. Couldn’t you manage to kill kids, or what?”

“Nothing’s keeping you here.”

“Of course there is! You’ve cut off every goddamn way off this island—”

“There’s nothing keeping you _here_. Fucking hell…”

Nick turned away, sauntered along the shoreline. It took Harry a while to realise he was walking away, and by then Nick was shrinking in the dark.

“I love you,” Harry panted, “But you’re terrible.”

Nick kept walking. He carried Harry with him in stride.

“I’m tired of you crucifying me,” he said, in reply to Harry’s sour breaths. “Yeah, shit, fine. I think I’ve paid for what I’ve done, first and foremost to you, and I hope that you have as well. But if you’d taken to heart the spanners you’ve put in the works in my life, you wouldn’t still be harassing me. When I’ve finally reached my destination and found meaning in all this, you come along and conveniently drop the love confessions. To sway me. How cruel is that?”

“How cruel,” Harry said and launched a hand onto Nick’s shoulder, “Is ending the lives of two hundred people just because you think that’s what they deserve?

Body stirring in Harry’s grip, Nick was eventually allowed to raise his hands in defeat. “It was incredibly unfair of me to aim a kick at your sister. That was below the belt and it was certainly beneath me. I get that it’s sensitive, and it’s not any of my business, either.” Their

eyes met. “It’s more difficult in love. Everything becomes way more serious. You…” And he quieted, let his feet carry him along.

It was slower now, the heaving of his shoulders under deep breaths, the brush of soles against bleak sand. How soft the skin was after a run on the beach, Harry pondered, weathered soft and nothing else. So Harry walked with him, and for a while neither said nothing, though Harry kept wishing for Nick to pick the thread back up.

 _You_.

Harry looked to the moon for comfort and Nick didn’t notice because he’d felt many of Harry’s glances all over himself during their stroll. When he looked back down, he said, “I’m scared of the dark.” Much of it became enveloped in a sigh.

“How come?” Nick asked.

It felt as though they had time. As though a massacre didn’t await and as though the sun would grace them for many years to come. It felt like breakfasts in bed and walking dogs in modest rain and falling asleep to another telly sensation. If nothing else, Harry could afford to prolong this moment, even if it still led to them all turned outwards with bullet holes on cool marble.

“It’s the thought of never seeing the sun rise again. But I don’t know when it started. Or, I’m not sure when it took over me this fully. It probably hasn’t been more than two nights in a row that I haven’t had any nightmares. Sometimes there are several of them a night, still.”

“What about calling your mum? Is that something you fear you’ll never do?”

“Absolutely. There are too many regrets to count. So isn’t the best I can do to just ignore them?”

“Isolate yourself on an island,” Nick concluded, followed Harry’s gaze downwards, where they had gradually walked closer to one another.

Harry placed himself on the dunes. Patches of grass spoke of a shoreline growing tougher, so he seized the opportunity to empty his shoes of grains. Nick fell down with him, broadened his arms and rubbed them along the ground. Overhead, airplane-wide, adjacent to Harry’s waist.

“Sand angels,” he said plainly.

“And what are you afraid of?”

“You, honestly.” He said it with a slight laugh, as if he’d thought about saying it multiple times and was surprised at how easily it was voiced. “That I disgust you or will drive you away. That I’ll die with an unrequited love after having done all this. We haven’t been good to each other.”

“I know that, but saying _all this_ makes it sound like some grand romantic gesture—”

“And I know what you’re going to say,” Nick said, already with grains of sand tangled in his hair and Harry wanted to drive his hands into it, “But it kind of is, isn’t it? I want to die with everyone dear to me. Afraid of you, sure. More than anything I’m afraid of dying unloved. And there’s no need for anyone to die alone here. There’s no use in dying if it isn’t together.”

“You shithead,” Harry said, hoisting himself up, dipping over Nick. “Everyone’s here because they’re in love with you in some way. Well, I didn’t come for that. I came to die in fucking peace, and you roped me in. Doesn’t mean I don’t love you. And you have the guts to

lie here and say that no one cares? Stop being dramatic. It’s here! It’s here if you just reach out and grab—”

Nick did, slid his fingers past Harry’s ear and onto his neck. Guided down and rose up. Gathered the last of Harry’s words in his mouth.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Harry didn’t know if they were saying it together. He couldn’t count on his mouth, his ears, couldn’t see anything through lidded eyes. Hot of salsa and intensely lonesome to taste, Harry realised Nick hadn’t had any thoughts of anyone being on the island purely for his company. There had never been security in the numbers. All that was had been thrusted to this curtain call.

“It’s here,” Harry said when they brushed apart for a second. “Everything is here if you want it.”

When they continued walking the shore, rounding back towards the Mandela, hand grossly in hand like teens or elderly about to enter the grave in stride, the sky wasn’t joyous and the marrow of treetops on the island were still beset by night. Harry still yearned for the dawn, couldn’t bear the dark. They neared the resort. Nick’s curtain call clamoured for them.

Sylvester stormed out, livelier than Harry had seen him since their last bout of strip poker, the closest they’d gotten to obtaining Lionel’s supposed nudes. His face blended a peculiar melange of sorrow and glee that nearly blew the roof off of Harry’s newly assembled card house. It didn’t become easier to diverge these emotions when Sylvester started speaking.

“With Amelia, she was like a sister, you know,” Sylvester started, “In the way you sometimes need a baby sitter and happen to have a cool sister available. Or when you need a lift to Taco Bell and she has twenty minutes to kill before her next class. Not just convenience, of course, but that type of sister. The honest, steadfast type.”

He’d found Lionel.

“But with him it was more spiritual. He never wanted to live as long as he did. I don’t think he’d planned on ever seeing his brother again. Up in the mountains and whatnot. It was just the plan that made the most sense at that time. Admittedly, my plan hasn’t been crystal clear, but you and me both have had plans we’ve followed through. Almost.” At this he sounded relieved, more than anything. Harry stepped forth, climbed the deck. “Which is why I’m mourning him with a smile. God, that’s insensitive. I’m mourning him because he was real family to me, and I know he’ll be happier being without us from here on. Doesn’t mean I want you to do the same though. You hear me?”

“I’ve no plans to leave,” Harry said, had managed to edge a hand onto Sylvester’s shoulder.

“So where are you going?”

“Calling my mum. Want to come with?”

“There’s a landline,” Nick said from the background.

“Do you want _me_ , or do you want company? ‘Cause there’s plenty of both here, if you want to stay.” Now he acknowledged Nick, but his silence until then hadn’t been hostile. “Maybe you and I could talk for a while.”

Harry watched them go, hadn’t started walking off when Nick ran back to him a note of directions and a set of car keys, eyes mellowed and smile still tense, but turning lax. Harry

wasn’t sure whether or not it felt natural to go by himself and thought about how incredulous it was, after the past weeks, that his scheme had worked out in the end.

The air filled with purring gasoline and headlights rendered the landscape monochrome. After a humble burst of sound, the radio died and he put in perhaps the only CD in the car that had its entire span of lacquer left. As he drove, listening to _I was sitting by the phone, I was waiting all alone_ , he kept one hand clutched and the other poised on the wheel, pinching the small yellow post-it with crowfoot letters scrawled all over.

***

One of the last chores of the year was Harry’s bottoms-upping of every remaining glass that didn’t carry an all-too repelling taste. Bodies lay around, some dead, some fast asleep, and it made little difference to anyone; most had left for the shore. The strobes and candlelight had since long matured to black, but dawn nipped at the horizon and fitted the island lilac. It felt like the first day of spring, though Harry couldn’t believe it was one of the last days of proper summer.

Someone woke up on the ballroom floor, dragged themselves off the stained marble and searched for their other shoe briefly. Upon looking out the windows, they left for the terrace and disappeared in light. It whited out all reflective surfaces and if Harry had wanted to, he could have picked up one of the glass bowls, dipped his head into it and disappeared into oblivion.

He was busy discerning the substance of a glass either holding absinthe or period blood or vinegar oil when he noticed Nick reclined in one of the armchairs close to stage. It had moved since Harry’s performance and now faced the rest of the ballroom, sporting a simple slash in its side, but standing proud otherwise.

“I have an hour.”

“If they miscalculated her arrival by a week, I wouldn’t bet on an hour. Forty minutes.”

“I like it better here.”

Nick got up. He came over and took Harry’s shoulders in his hands. “Where you can sit quietly and smell the… glasses? Don’t think that you’ll find what you’re looking for in there.”

“I listened to see if your knees would pop when you got out of that chair.”

Nick ruffled his hair. He must have had a shower, for Harry couldn’t smell much at all on him but sweat and sunshine. Morning had broken. Nick helped him up and into the sand at the foot of the resort. They still had a long way to go to the assembly on the shoreline.

Nick proposed, “I have three categories about which we could speak, if you’d like. Past, present or future. Take your pick.”

For a while, Harry kept to his silence. Sylvester emerged from the masses and gave him a glance. Then he sent them a double-armed wave, as if making sand angels. Nick sent a massive one back. Those swimming in the still calm ocean were yapping and splashing each other. The sun shone on all of the assembled.

“It just doesn’t feel right to talk about anything at all,” he said.

“Take this then,” Nick said and placed a golden package in his hand.

Harry read the fortune in the cookie. He wasn’t sure if he’d said or done everything he wanted to do, could still hear his mother crying in his ear, not speaking much. Perhaps he’d adopted her approach.

Nick stepped onto the lowest step of the stairs behind Harry and let his fingers delve into Harry’s shoulders, lift off, delve in. Harry edged back so they both could stand comfortably and leaned into the touch.

They said nothing.


End file.
